


In Your Debt

by exclamation



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Slavery, Catatonic Peter Hale, Dead Sheriff Stilinski, Debt, Hales Are Still Werewolves, Human Scott McCall, Indentured Servitude, M/M, Non-Sexual Slavery, Slow build Sterek, system reform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-06
Updated: 2016-06-20
Packaged: 2018-05-31 15:18:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 25
Words: 65,856
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6475477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/exclamation/pseuds/exclamation
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Hales need someone to take care of their catatonic uncle, but they can't afford a real medical professional. Instead, they make use of the indentured servitude program to hire a debtor at a low wage. </p><p>Derek expects to hire some deadbeat but instead he gets Stiles Stilinski, an intelligent sixteen-year-old who definitely doesn't deserve to be trapped in this system. As he gets to know Stiles, Derek is left wondering how Stiles ended up in this situation, and soon he has questions about the justification of the system as a whole. </p><p>He wants to help Stiles, but he can't pay of Stiles' debt for him and he has no power over the system that holds Stiles prisoner.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I haven't given up on It Ain't Exactly Hogwarts, but I can't resist a slavery AU. This one is a little different and deals with indentured servitude - the situation where someone is forced to work to pay off a debt. 
> 
> This story will be Sterek but it may take a long time to get to that point. Settle in for the long haul with this one.

Derek wasn’t expecting much from the pool of dropouts and deadbeats that would be available, but they couldn’t afford a care home or an actual nurse to take care of Peter and they needed the help. Derek would also gladly never have to insert a catheter into his uncle’s dick ever again. It was Laura who had come up with the idea of debtor but she had work and so it was Derek who had to come and find someone suitable. He’d probably have to settle for not horrifically unsuitable. He had visions of bringing home someone so shaky from drug withdrawal that they’d manage to stab Peter’s throat out trying to insert the feeding tube. 

He filled out the first set of forms and handed them over to the receptionist before taking an uncomfortable seat in the rundown waiting area. He’d brought a history text book with him and made it through a chapter and a half before he was finally called through to the office. The woman who greeted him was serious and smartly suited. Derek wondered he she was judging him for showing up in jeans. She looked over his paperwork and then asked him to summarise the work that would be required, despite the fact that it was written on the form in front of her. 

“Taking care of a comatose man,” Derek said. “There’s a set of exercises that need to be done daily, lifting his limbs, stretching his muscles, stuff like that. There’s some plumbing stuff,” Derek gestured vaguely towards his crotch, not wanting to spell that out, “and giving him a nutrient solution for meals. There’d be a few other things, like giving him sponge baths, cleaning his bedsheets, stuff like that.” 

There was a full list that had come with Peter from the hospital when he’d been sent home. 

“Is any medical training required?” the woman asked. 

“No.” 

“Any special skills necessary?” 

“A strong stomach,” Derek said. He thought about the first time he’d had to deal with Peter’s waste. 

“And this would be for a home setup. You’d be keeping the debtor in your house.” 

It hadn’t really been a question, but Derek said, “Yes,” anyway. 

The woman frowned and looked at Derek for a moment, clearly thinking hard about something. 

“I think I know just who to assign you,” she said. She went over to a filing cabinet and dug around, bringing out a small cardboard folder which she offered to Derek. He opened it up and skimmed over the first page, wincing at the garble of letters that formed the first name. As he’d expected, no qualifications listed, not even a high school diploma. Then Derek saw something and frowned. 

“This has got to be a typo,” he said. 

“The name? No, that’s his real name but he goes by a nickname that’s easier to pronounce.” 

“No. The date of birth. This says he’s sixteen.” 

“That’s right.” 

What the hell had a teenager managed to do to get himself in the debtor program? Derek just found himself being led through to another room to meet this candidate with the unpronounceable first name and a date of birth that wasn’t a typo. The room looked a bit like the interview rooms shown in cop dramas on TV. There was a metal table and a couple of chairs facing across from each other. There was a metal bar on the table in front of one of the chairs. Derek was waved to sit in the other one. 

He was left to wait for a few minutes and he was just considering opening up his text book again when a couple of burly guards brought a skinny kid in. He looked half the weight of either one of them, dressed in a grey jumpsuit that hung off him. He was pale and hollow cheeked, like he hadn’t eaten a good meal in a month, and he glared at Derek with bloodshot eyes. His eyes radiated anger and defiance, but his scent said something entirely different. He stank of despair, of pain so deep it exuded from every pore. 

He was pushed into the chair and one of the guards yanked his arm to handcuff his wrist to the bar on the table. The kid rolled his eyes. 

“Because I was planning on drop-kicking you both in the head and making a break for it,” he said, the sarcastic bite in his tone as defiant as his glare. The guards left and the kid turned his attention to Derek, looking him up and down. 

“You don’t look like a corporate exec here to fill a sweatshop’s ranks,” the kid said, “so, let me guess, porn? You want some twink to get it up the ass in dirty videos? Because I’m a little body shy. I’m not sure I’d be able to perform up to your expectations.” 

His tone was fierce, but Derek could hear the rapid stutter of his heart and smell the fear that mingled with his pain. The kid was terrified of what Derek might expect him to do. Derek wondered if the porn industry really did recruit from debtors. And did the debtors get any choice in the matter? Derek could walk out of here and tell that woman that he wanted to hire this kid, and she’d fill out the paperwork without the kid getting a chance to object, so long as Derek stuck to the terms of the legal contract. Could some porn director do the same? And would anyone cry rape if they did? 

Derek thought of this frightened, miserable kid being forced into a situation like that and his blood boiled. If the kid was genuinely afraid that might be his fate, Derek knew he couldn’t just leave him to it. He knew, in that instant, that there was no way he could choose anyone else today. 

“Well?” the kid asked. “Do you speak? Or is glower your first language?” 

“Anyone ever tell you that you should be more polite?” Derek asked. 

The kid snorted, “My teachers. My lacrosse coach. My dad.” There was something that happened in the heartbeat after he said the word dad. It was a subtle shift in his expression, combined with a resurgence of the despair scent. The angry defiance faltered just for a moment, but just for a moment. Immediately afterwards, the kid was glaring again. 

“I don’t know how to pronounce your first name,” Derek said. “I gather you use a nickname?” 

“Stiles. Just call me Stiles.” 

“Well, Stiles, I’m Derek.” 

“We’re on first name terms already? So you really do want to stick it up my ass, don’t you?” 

“I’m not going to rape you,” Derek snarled. “There’s nothing sexual.” He considered and then felt he had to add, “But you will have to touch my uncle’s dick.” 

“Oh, nothing sexual about that at all.” The sarcasm was back. 

“He’s in a coma. There’d better be nothing sexual. We need someone to nurse him.” He summarised the main jobs as he had done in the office. “Do you want the job?” 

The kid, Stiles, looked at Derek with genuine surprise, “You’re actually giving me a choice?” 

“Well, given that it seems like a choice between me and the porn, it doesn’t strike me as much of one.” 

“You’ve got that right. Very well, Derek, I will manhandle your uncle’s dick.” Stiles held out his uncuffed hand for Derek to shake. Derek wondered if he was going to regret this choice. 

***

The paperwork took forever. Derek had to sign forms and arrange for bank transfers to take the kid’s wages and pay it into debt account, minus the standard sum for food, accommodation, and miscellaneous living expenses. He was also given the procedure for claiming back the cost of any additional expenses. 

There were also medical needs. Apparently this kid had some medication he was supposed to take daily. The program could arrange for a monthly supply to be shipped to them. There would be a small fee, deducted from Stiles’ debtor account, but Derek figured it was worth the hassle and it was only two dollars a month extra. 

There were procedures if Stiles should not perform his job satisfactorily or if he was caught misbehaving, damaging property, or any of a list of about three dozen possible offenses. Any of these actions would be logged against Stiles’ file and a fine would be applied to his debtor account. If Stiles broke something that belonged to them, they would be reimbursed for the value of whatever it was, the cost of which would be taken out of the debtor account along with a two hundred dollar fine. A report of any breaches in these rules would result in money being taken out of Stiles’ debtor account. 

“How much money does he owe already?” Derek asked, looking at these fines. 

“Legally, we can’t share that information. All we can do is give you notice when he might be able to repay his debt within three months, should you wish to make other arrangements. Suffice it to say, he isn’t within three months of paying back his debt.” 

Derek nodded and continued through the paperwork. When everything was signed and legal, he went back to the reception. Stiles was brought out, still wearing the grey jumpsuit but now he had a large tracking cuff around his right ankle. Derek had been expecting that. The paperwork had included details and apparently the fine for tampering with or damaging the cuff was five thousand dollars, plus the cost of a new cuff. 

Stiles didn’t have anything else with him, not even a change of underwear. Of course, Derek could fill out a form and send in receipts to be reimbursed for the cost of new clothing. Presumably it was up to him to buy stuff for Stiles. They’d have to make a stop on the way home. 

“This way,” Derek said. Stiles didn’t say a word as he followed Derek out of the building, but his pace slowed as they went down the steps. Derek looked back, wondering if maybe Stiles was hurt and going slowly because of some injury, but he’d just turned his face towards the sun and was lingering to soak up the warmth. 

Stiles caught Derek looking at him and hurried his pace, mumbling a brief apology. Derek didn’t know how to respond to that. He looked back at the building they’d just left and wondered how long Stiles had been in there. How long it had been since Stiles had stood in sunlight. 

Derek led him to the Camaro and Stiles let out an appreciative breath. Laura kept saying that they should trade this car in for a more practical model, but Derek couldn’t bring himself to do anything of the sort. 

Derek drove them to the big Walmart on the outskirts of town and Stiles’ breathing rose until he was almost gasping. The scent of panic laced the air. Derek parked and turned to look at his passenger, whose eyes were on the massive shop, fear clearly showing in them. 

“We need to get you some clothes and stuff,” Derek explained. “Unless you want to keep wearing the same jumpsuit forever.” 

Stiles looked even more scared. Derek wondered if he was about to have a panic attack. He didn’t know how to deal with a panic attack. Mentioning the jumpsuit had clearly been the worst thing to say. Stiles was obviously terrified of being out in public as he was now, so obviously a debtor. 

“You can stay in the car if you like,” Derek said. 

Stiles seemed to relax. Derek waited to make sure Stiles wasn’t going to faint or be sick or something, then he started to get out of the car. An instant later, Stiles’ heartrate sored with fear again. 

“Wait,” Stiles said. “I will come with you.” 

Derek decided to say nothing about Stiles’ fear, mostly because he hadn’t the faintest idea what to say that would make this alright. He just went inside and grabbed a basket, heading for the clothing section. Eyes did glance their way as Stiles walked right behind him. Derek ignored them and grabbed packets of socks and briefs. He told Stiles to grab a couple of pairs of jeans his size and then went to look at the t-shirts. Derek went for the plain t-shirts, grabbing six that were on a three for two offer. He was just looking around, wondering what else Stiles might need, when he saw Stiles looking at a hoodie with a spider web pattern on it. Derek wasn’t sure if it was a reference to Spiderman or just a piece of artistic design. 

“You want it?” Derek asked. 

Stiles shook his head, “It costs too much.” 

“The program is reimbursing the costs for this stuff,” Derek said. 

Stiles glared at him, “By the adding the cost to my debt. I don’t need it.” He glanced at Derek’s basket. “I don’t need that many t-shirts either.” 

Six t-shirts was not exactly a splurge, but Stiles insisted he didn’t need them, and took three of them out of the basket. In the end, Derek bought a single pair of jeans, three t-shirts, the socks, and the briefs. He also brought toothbrush, toothpaste and deodorant, choosing the cheapest option for each. 

When they went to the checkout, the woman ringing up their purchases looked up and met Stiles’ eyes. There was the briefest moment of contact and then she nodded her head the tiniest fraction of an inch. Stiles nodded back, the movement just as miniscule. Something passed between them, some moment of connection, sympathy and recognition. Derek wondered if he would see a tracking cuff if he looked beneath her checkout. 

Derek was absolutely famished by the time he pulled the car onto the narrow road that led the house. Stiles, who had begun to relax after leaving the store, instantly started to get tense again. He stared out the window at the dense woods. 

“Please don’t tell me you’re planning on chaining me up in a creepy cabin in the middle of the woods where no one can hear me scream.” 

“You’ve seen too many horror movies,” Derek said. 

“I’m not hearing a no.” 

“Our house is out here, but it’s not creepy.” He didn’t believe in ghosts so he didn’t believe that his family were hanging out haunting them. 

Stiles didn’t relax until they reached the entirely non-creepy house and Derek parked next to Laura’s car. He grabbed the bag of clothes and followed Derek up the steps and inside. There was a clatter of noise from the kitchen and then Laura was there, looking Stiles up and down. 

“My sister Laura,” Derek said. “Laura, this is Stiles.” 

Laura nodded, glanced at Derek, then forced a smile, “I’m just finishing up dinner. Why don’t you take... Stiles through to Peter’s room and show him the basics.” 

Peter’s room was on the first floor so they didn’t have to worry about lifting him up the stairs. Even with werewolf strength, that would have been annoying. The space was crowded, with Peter’s wheelchair taking up one corner, and the camp bed filling most of the space between Peter’s bed and the bookshelves. Peter looked as he always did, blank eyes staring up at the ceiling. It wasn’t really a coma, according to the doctors, but the term they had used was complicated and Derek could never remember it. They carried on using the word coma for the sake of simplicity. 

Derek walked Stiles through the plumbing requirements and showed the tubes, carefully labelled although Derek couldn’t see how anyone could mistake the feeding tube for the catheter. He showed him the papers with the various exercises listed. 

“I’ll show you how to do them tomorrow,” he said. He showed Stiles the soap and sponge for washing, Peter’s toothbrush, razor and everything else. There was a printed list of tasks and how often they needed to be completed. Derek showed this to Stiles as well. 

“Only once a day for brushing his teeth?” he asked. 

“He’s not exactly guzzling sodas and chewing sweets,” Derek explained. 

It would be Stiles’ job to make sure that all of these tasks were done. When Derek had finished explaining his duties, Laura called through that dinner was ready.


	2. Chapter 2

Stiles seemed surprised that he was sitting down to eat dinner with the family but he sat at the table and accepted his plate of lasagne with a quiet mutter of thanks. Derek introduced him to Cora when she came down. 

“You don’t look any older than me,” she said. “What that hell did you do to get in debt?” 

“Bought a Faberge egg and made it into an omelette,” Stiles snapped. He didn’t try to disguise his anger. Derek guessed this meant they weren’t going to get a straight answer. 

“Do you understand what you’re supposed to do?” Laura asked. 

“Yep. Got it. Clean your uncle, stick tubes in both ends, and move him around so his muscles don’t turn to mush.” 

Laura's mouth set in disapproval. “I’m not sure I’d put it quite like that.” 

Stiles actually looked genuine as he apologised. “Sorry. That wasn’t very respectful to your uncle. Won’t happen again.” 

He bent his head down over his dinner. Derek thought about that this list of possible offenses and their accompanying fines. Inappropriate attitude was on that list. Derek could probably fill out a form and Stiles would have an extra ten dollars added to his debt. Given how he’d fretted about the t-shirts, that was probably what Stiles was afraid of now. Stiles had been all defiance back in that interview room but now the fear was obvious again, wafting over the table and souring the taste of lasagne. 

“You’ll be paid to work eight hours a day,” Laura said. “Eight until twelve, a lunch break, and then one to four-thirty, with a final half hour to make sure everything is set before you go to bed.” Stiles nodded. “We’ll help you for the first couple of days to make sure you know what to do.” 

“What am I supposed to do when I’m not working?” Stiles asked. 

This question seemed to catch Laura off guard, though it was less surprising for Derek. Stiles hadn’t got anything to entertain himself with and almost certainly wouldn’t want to spend money on anything, but there was probably a rule against touching anything that didn’t belong to him without permission. 

“We’ve got a TV,” Laura said, “and books and stuff. Use what you want but just keep from being a nuisance.” 

Stiles nodded again. Derek heard the increase in Stiles’ heartrate before Stiles spoke. 

“Can I… I mean… Would I be allowed…” Stiles stammered nervously until Derek wanted to yell at him to just spit it out. “Could I use your phone?” 

“Of course,” Derek said, because it was obvious this was really important to him. 

“But,” Laura put in, “if you start calling long distance or premium numbers and you’ll have to pay the cost of the bill.” 

“I won’t. I promise.” 

Stiles bent to his food again. It was strange to hear his silence after the way he’d talked back in the interview room. Derek had expected that fury to continue, but Stiles seemed to have lost some of his life as he came here. Maybe he would get it back when he realised he had nothing to be afraid of. 

Stiles ate the rest of his meal in silence while Cora talked about school and Laura complained about a colleague who had been stealing food from the communal fridge. She’d apparently had her soup stolen today and a co-worker had found his sandwich missing the day before. They weren’t sure who was responsible. She’d left a note on the fridge but she wasn’t sure the lunch thief would pay attention. 

After dinner, Derek offered his phone to Stiles and then got on with washing up the dishes while Cora did homework and Laura went jogging to work off some of her frustrations. Stiles went through to the living room, presumably so he would have privacy for his call. Derek knew he probably ought to just let Stiles make the call, but he was curious and he told himself that he should make sure that Stiles wasn’t planning to escape or something. So Derek tried to splash as little as possible while he pricked up his ears. A woman’s voice answered the phone. 

“Hey, Melissa,” Stiles said. 

“Stiles?” 

“Yeah. Is Scott th-“ 

Stiles didn’t finish the question before there was a frantic scrabbling noise and then a male voice demanded, “Stiles? Are you OK?” 

“I’m fine.” 

Derek didn’t need to listen to Stiles’ heartbeat to know that was a lie. 

“Where are you? Are you still in the program? What are they making you do?” 

“It’s not too bad. Helping a family look after a sick relative. Only eight hours work a day so I’ll have paid off the debt by about the time I’m ready to retire, but the work could be a lot worse.” 

“Stiles, if you need anythi-“ 

“No!” Stiles snapped. He continued more calmly, “No. You’ve got your own bills to pay. I’ll be fine. I’ll get through this.” 

“This isn’t right,” the woman’s voice was back. “This shouldn’t be legal.” 

“Not going to argue with you there,” Stiles said. “Look, I’ve got to go. I just wanted to let you guys know that I’m OK.” 

“Can I come see you?” the boy, Scott, asked. 

“I don’t think that’s a good idea. I do miss you though, bro. Take care of yourself.” 

“I should be telling you that. Take care, Stiles.” 

“Will do. Bye.” 

Derek had been standing by the sink, his hands in the water, but he hadn’t been washing anything for most of that call. He returned to the task now, trying to look like he hadn’t been invading Stiles’ privacy. Not that Stiles would guess that Derek could overhear a phone call taking place in another room. Derek continued wiping plates as Stiles returned to the kitchen. 

“Put the phone on the table,” Derek said. His hands were soaked. Stiles did as he was told. 

“Thanks,” he said. 

“I’ve got more minutes on my contract than I ever use,” Derek said. “Don’t hesitate if you want to call someone again.” 

“Thanks,” Stiles said again. 

***  
The following morning, Derek went through Peter’s morning routine for what he hoped was the last time. Changing the catheter bag was the most disgusting part, but the exercises were the most tedious. Every muscle in Peter’s body needed to be moved and stretched. The whole routine took forever, and it was longer than ever today because Derek had to demonstrate each move carefully and then let Stiles try it to make sure he got it. There was a long checklist to go down to make sure nothing got forgotten. 

By the time they were done, Derek decided it was close enough to twelve to call it Stiles’ lunchbreak. 

“There’s still eleven minutes left,” Stiles said. That spike of fear was back. 

“I won’t tell anyone,” Derek said. “Tell you what, if you make the sandwiches, then you’ll still be working.” 

Stiles relaxed a little and went through to the kitchen. He made sandwiches for them both and they sat together at the kitchen table. 

“How long’s your uncle been like that?” Stiles asked. 

“Six years. He was worse at the start. The doctors were sure he wasn’t going to make it. After half a year, he improved. He started breathing on his own, started opening his eyes, even blinking.” Derek remembered the hope they’d had then, the belief that his werewolf healing would kick in, that the exercises would trigger his natural responses. Derek remembered the way hope had faded and continued, “But he plateaued. After that first year, he stopped getting better.” 

“If he’s been in this state for five years,” Stiles said, “why did you wait until now to hire someone like me?” 

“He was in a proper care facility but the bills…” Derek shrugged. 

“Medical bills. Tell me about it.” 

“We brought him out of the facility a couple of months ago. The plan was to look after him ourselves but it takes so much time.” 

They could probably give up on the exercises and let him whither, but that felt like admitting defeat, like giving up on their uncle ever recovering. As long as they kept up the exercises, kept his body functioning properly, it felt like there was a chance he could come back to them. They had so little family now that they had to hold on to what they had. 

Derek wondered whether to ask about Stiles’ medical bills comment. Maybe that lay at the heart of the answer Stiles had refused to give Cora the day before. Derek knew that Stiles had regular medication to take, but it seemed astonishing that Stiles would have to pay the debt and not a family member. Why would the debt be loaded onto a child? 

“Do you know what you’re supposed to do this afternoon?” Derek asked. 

“Sponge bath, change his robe, shave him, then feed him like we did at breakfast.” 

They only had to feed Peter twice a day, since it wasn’t like he was aware to feel hungry. A doctor had suggested IV nutrient solution once, but his body had a tendency to heal around the needle which complicated things, and the medical professions quickly noticed something weird was going on. Peter’s body wasn’t healing his brain or his burn scars, but it was healing just enough to be a risk of exposure. 

“What do I do if I run out of stuff to do before four-thirty?” Stiles asked. 

Derek shrugged, “Eight hours a day is the minimum contract. If you finish up the work before then, you finish early. It doesn’t matter as long as you do everything you’re supposed to.” 

Stiles’ eyes were fixed on him with suspicion, “I can get fined it I don’t work my hours.” 

“You’re not going to get fined,” Derek insisted. “If you do everything I ask, you can’t be blamed for that.” 

He didn’t look entirely convinced, but he stopped arguing. Derek decided to leave him to it. He had plenty to do that had been disrupted by playing nurse to Peter. He headed upstairs to his room and got his laptop out. He had a paper on comparing the pre-Columbian civilisations of North America that he’d barely started and it was due in two days. Derek sat down at his desk, opened up his outline, and got on with work. 

He was halfway to his word count before he decided to take a break. He sat back and only then noticed the flow of words coming from downstairs. Derek pricked up his ears. 

“Seriously, why is it whenever someone thinks about psychology, they always go to Freud?” Stiles was asking. “All his theories were debunked or completely unverifiable, but anyone who thinks themselves a psychologist can talk about Freudian slips and the id and the Oedipus complex and all that nonsense. Freud just pulled garbage out of his ass and called itself a theory.” 

Derek wondered who Stiles was talking to. He continued on as though someone had made an argument but Derek hadn’t heard any other voices. 

“Sure, OK, he deserves some credit for getting psychology recognised as a valid scientific field, but his ideas have all been debunked. People should stop spewing them.” 

Derek was actually tempted to go downstairs and see what was going on. Stiles appeared to be having a heated debate with himself. Was he entirely stable? Was he really the best person to be in charge of a helpless invalid? 

“You really should get something about the behavioural psychologists. A lot of their research is really interesting and, no, I’m not just talking about rats in mazes. There are things like the obedience study and the Stanford prison experiment, and there’s a really interesting one on group behaviour.” Stiles went on to explain an experiment where a roomful of stooges would give an obviously wrong answer to a question to see if the only real subject would go along with what they said. 

Derek decided to go and investigate because he needed to know who the hell Stiles was talking to. He walked downstairs and headed to Peter’s room. He eased the door open on silent hinges. Stiles was facing away from the door, looking at the bed, continuing his story for several seconds before he noticed the movement behind him and jumped, flailing his arms and nearly tripping over his feet as he turned to the door. He almost ended up falling onto Peter’s bed. 

“Jeez! Make a little noise when you move,” Stiles complained. 

“I heard you talking,” Derek said. “You were talking to yourself?” 

“I was talking to Uncle Comatose over there,” Stiles said, “but he wasn’t really keeping up his side of the conversation. Not that he’s really comatose. That term covers a huge range of situations but none of them really fit with him, but there are all those stories about people in comas who can hear what’s going on around them. There was a guy who was unresponsive for years and everyone thought he was a vegetable but they stuck him in a machine to read his brain activity and they told him to imagine walking through his house, and they recorded the activity, then they told him to picture, I can’t remember what it was, let’s say playing tennis, and they recorded that activity. Afterwards, they asked him questions and told him to picture the house for yes and the tennis for no, and they had conversations with the guy and built up more complexity over time. This guy everyone thought was braindead became able to communicate.” 

“How do you know all this?” asked Derek, when Stiles paused for breath. He was still trying to catch up with all Stiles had just said. 

“Brain injuries are interesting,” Stiles answered. “That sounded really creepy, didn’t it? I just meant I like reading about this stuff because people’s minds are so complex. I don’t know if your uncle’s aware of anything but I figured it couldn’t hurt to talk to him. I mean, if he is aware, he’s probably going crazy from boredom, and if he’s not, it’s not like talking is doing any harm.” Stiles shrugged. 

Derek didn’t know what to say. After the fire, they’d sat at Peter’s bedside and talked to him. When they’d thought he might be recovering, they’d visited often, trying to bring him back to them, but over time their enthusiasm had faded. Stiles’ probably would too when Peter just lay there, unresponsive, but it was still nice of him to try. He was here to do a job but he’d thought about Peter as a person, not just a list of tasks, and that said a lot about him. 

Stiles clearly read Derek’s silence the wrong way, “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” 

“No. Talk to him all you like. Maybe he’ll get sick of it and come to just to tell you to shut up.” 

Derek didn’t believe that, but he left Stiles to it. He went to get a drink and returned to his studies, while Stiles was down in Peter’s room talking about stroke patient recovery and the elasticity of the human brain. How did Stiles know all this stuff? He hadn’t even graduated high school. Derek had expected the debtor to be a barely literate idiot, not a teenager who could talk about psychology and brain trauma like he was a subject matter expert. The more Derek saw, the more of an enigma Stiles was.


	3. Chapter 3

“Dead, straight, white guy,” Stiles said, “dead, straight, white guy, dead, straight, white guy. Seriously, Peter, you need some variety on your shelves. Or at least a book written less than fifty years ago. Are you one of those snobs who thinks a work only has literary merit if it’s twice as old as you are? And, really, how much Dickens does one guy need? Sure, the guy could write a beautiful turn of phrase, but he was also paid by the word and padded the hell out of everything. Who needs three copies of A Christmas Carol? Who needs one? You should not bother with the book and just watch the Muppet version because Gonzo’s narration had all the good lines and it cut the waffle.” 

Derek was chopping vegetables as quietly as he could so he could hear the flow of words coming from Peter’s room. He didn’t think Stiles had paused all afternoon. He’d moved on from the one-sided debate on psychology to literary criticism of every book on Peter’s shelves. The really weird thing was that Stiles seemed to be speaking from experience, like he’d read a good chunk of these books personally. Derek could have expected him to read one or two for school, but not this many. 

He described one book saying, “Racist as fuck and makes it sound like England invading half the world was an act of mercy.” Another was dismissed as a, “Pretentious snoozefest.” 

“I’m going to have to introduce you to some good literature,” Stiles said after this had been going on a while and Derek felt he had to go to his uncle’s defence. He set down his vegetable knife and went to Peter’s room. 

“He had other books,” Derek said. “He had several tons of books. In the fire, when he was injured, we lost all of the ones that had been in the house. These ones,” he gestured at the shelves, “were the ones he put in boxes in the shed when he ran out of shelf space. I think he was allergic to selling books so he kept all of them, but the only ones that survived the fire were the ones he packed away because he wasn’t likely to read them again.” 

“Oh,” said Stiles, he turned to the bed. “Sorry, Peter, I guess I’ve been misjudging you.” 

“To be fair,” Derek said, “he did read a lot of books by dead, straight, white guys.” 

Stiles smirked for just a moment before his face closed off and he looked at Derek with suspicion and anger, “How long were you listening to me?” 

“A while, on and off. I was just through in the kitchen and your voice... carried.” 

It wasn’t implausible that he could have overheard by accident from the kitchen. Only the narrow entrance hall separated the rooms and the doors had been open. Still, Derek needed to be a lot more careful if he didn’t want to either appear like a creeper or give away that he had a supernatural edge to his hearing. 

“I’m going to go back to kitchen now,” Derek said. “You’re off duty now. You can do whatever you want.” 

He wasn’t sure what he expected but Stiles took one of the books off the shelves and started reading it aloud, pausing to add commentary with his thoughts as he went along. It was like having an audiobook on, so Derek kept listening as he continued the dinner preparation. Even when everything was cooking and just needed time, Derek stayed where he was, listening. 

He was still there when Cora came home from school. The second the front door opened, Stiles’ voice cut off. It was like someone had flipped a switch. The sudden quiet hit Derek like a blow and then Cora was there, still in her cheerleading outfit, grinning at him. 

“How was school?” Derek asked. 

“Meh.” 

“How was practice?” 

“Pretty good. Coach was talking about championships.” 

“That’s great news.” 

“Yeah, but if we compete, it all gets so intense and everyone starts stressing about every little detail. I just want to have fun with it, you know?” 

Cora went to the fridge and grabbed a bottle of water. She drank a mouthful and flicked her eyes towards in the door in Stiles’ direction. She asked in a much quieter voice, “How’s he getting on?” 

“Really well. He was talking to Peter, reading aloud to him and stuff, even though we didn’t tell him he had to.” 

Cora nodded, “Well, I’ve got a frigging ton of homework to do and there’s a whole mess around investment risk in economics that I can’t wrap my head around. I’d better get stuck in. Yell when it’s dinner.” 

Derek nodded, and then Cora left the kitchen as quickly as she’d come. Derek checked on the chicken, hoping that Cora’s feet pounding up the stairs would signal a return of Stiles’ voice, but it never came. Derek finished the dinner prep in silence. He was just laying everything out on the table when Laura came home. She saw the food. 

“Thank god,” she said, “I’m starving. The asshole stole my lunch again. I’d set up a camera in the kitchen to catch them in the act except that they’d probably steal the camera.” 

She was already serving herself before Derek had even called Stiles and Cora in to eat. Stiles took his place quietly with a nervous glance at Laura. He seemed intimidated by her, which seemed ridiculous to Derek because Laura was a complete softy. 

But then, maybe she was a little harsh in her tone as she asked Stiles, “How did you find your first day?” 

“Good. I think it went well.” Stiles looked to Derek for conformation and Derek nodded. 

“He did everything he was supposed to,” Derek said, “and he was talking to Peter on the off chance that Peter could hear.” 

“Any questions about the job?” Laura asked. 

“No. It all seems straight-forward.” That was apparently all Stiles was going to say. Maybe he’d talked himself out with Peter. 

Laura nodded and turned to ask Cora about school. That turned into a rant about economics and how Cora didn’t know why’d she’d chosen that subject and how she should have just stuck with Spanish. Derek noticed while Cora spoke that Stiles seemed to be looking at her with interest. A couple of times, Derek thought Stiles was about to speak but then he stayed quiet. Derek was left wondering if Stiles could ramble on about economics the way he had about psychology. Once again, he wondered how someone like Stiles had ended up in this situation. 

***

Stiles always asked if he was allowed to do something before doing it, even something as basic as using the shower and washing his own clothes when he washed Peter’s gowns. He asked if there was a computer he could use to browse the internet and Derek offered his laptop. Stiles sat in the living room with that laptop for over an hour, but when Derek checked, he realised Stiles must have used an incognito mode because there were no sites listed in the browser history. Derek felt dirty for snooping once he realised that Stiles had been trying to hide. 

Stiles wouldn’t so much as get a glass of water without permission, but he also didn’t pester Derek. He waited until Derek was downstairs taking a break, which made Derek wonder how long Stiles had been waiting to ask about that glass of water. 

“Look, we’re not assholes,” Derek said. “We’re not going to fine you or charge you money or report you for misbehaving if you get yourself a drink. You want a glass of water, grab a glass of water. You want a can of soda, go nuts.” 

“You could though,” Stiles said. “That’s the problem. If I grabbed a can of coke without permission, you could claim I was stealing from you. With the fines and interest and the piss poor wages the program offers, a can of coke could mean an extra couple of weeks of indentured service, maybe even a month.” 

“How about we make an agreement that if you do anything we don’t think you should be doing we tell you so that you can learn and not do it again and we only report it if you keep doing it after we’ve told you not to?” 

“The problem is you could break that agreement any time you choose. I could do something that annoys you and you could take a list of every minor infraction and report them all and get me in a new heap of trouble and I can’t do anything about it. It’s all about risk verses reward, like that investment stuff Cora was talking about the other day. For me, the risk is being trapped in legalised slavery for months or years longer than I need to be if you turn out to be more of an asshole than you think you are, and the reward is... a can of coke. It’s not worth it.” 

Derek's first instinct was to claim that he wasn’t an asshole, but of course an asshole wouldn’t have a problem lying about being an asshole. Stiles had clearly spent a lot of time thinking about this. 

He would tow every line and keep every rule. He would make sure he couldn’t be accused of stealing so much as a spin of the washing machine cycle. But apparently all his care about not taking risks couldn’t keep him from making his opinions known. Derek wasn’t sure why he liked that so much. Just another thing he wasn’t sure about regarding Stiles. 

“Do you know a lot about economics?” Derek asked. 

Stiles took the abrupt change of topic in stride, “Some. My economics teacher was the most interesting teacher in the school. Not the best teacher, but the most interesting.” 

“Cora’s teacher is definitely not the best and she’s struggling to make sense of it. You like talking. Maybe you could talk her through a few points. Consider it overtime.”

“You mean that if I spend an hour tutoring her, you’ll add an hour to my time sheet at the end of the week?” 

“Exactly. It might not make much of a dent in whatever you owe but-“ 

“I’ll do it,” the words came out in a rush, like Stiles expected Derek to rescind the offer if he was too slow to accept. Derek just nodded. How much money did Stiles owe? 

When that first week came to an end, Derek filled out the forms on the computer and submitted his report of Stiles’ work hours. He had a phone call the following day with the woman from the debtors program, wanting to check how things were going since he was new the procedures and wanting to check how Stiles was getting along. 

“Stiles is doing great,” Derek said. “He’s working hard and behaving himself.” 

“No problems with attitude?” 

“No problems with it,” Derek said, though Stiles wasn’t short on attitude. “I was wondering, if there was a way to give him a bonus for good behaviour? I know there are fines and stuff for misbehaving but I thought it might motivate him if he knew he could get a reward for doing well.” 

“There are account codes you can use to pay in extras if you want: bonuses, gifts, anything you like. Any money sent to that account gets taken off his debt.” There was something different in her tone. Derek thought she was smiling. She gave him the codes and continued, “If Stiles has access to a computer, he can check the status of his account so he’ll be able to see the payments come in.” 

“Thanks.” 

“He’s a good kid.” 

“Yeah,” Derek agreed. 

They wrapped up the call and Derek went to find Stiles, who was in Peter’s room, reading aloud from one of the books. 

“I finished all the jobs on the list,” Stiles said defensively. 

“I had an idea,” Derek said. He explained about the account codes he’d been given. “There are websites where you can write reviews about just about anything and you’re not shy with your opinion. The sites pay a cent or two every time someone finds your reviews helpful. You’d probably earn less per hour than looking after Peter, but I figured I’d mention it.” 

“I’m not allowed to get a job while I’m in the program.” 

“It’s not a job and as long as you look after Peter, I don’t care. Look, it’s up to you. I just thought you might want to shave a few cents off your debt. If you want the codes, let me know. You can borrow my computer when I’m not using it.” 

When Stiles didn’t say anything immediately, Derek took that as a sign the conversation was over. He started to leave the room. 

“Derek,” Stiles called after him. “Thanks.” 

“It’s nothing.” 

And it was nothing. It was a tiny bit of help that would cost Derek nothing. He went back to his computer and took the time to send ten dollars to Stiles’ account. He couldn’t afford to do this every week, but a one off payment wouldn’t hurt.


	4. Chapter 4

Stiles made a deal with Cora to tutor her in economics and calculus in exchange for access to her school text books. He claimed he wanted to stand a chance of getting his GED when he got out of the program, however long that might take. Derek didn’t doubt he’d manage that. Stiles was smart, as sharp as a knife. Even the subjects he said he didn’t know, he could figure out with nothing but Cora’s books, learning them well enough to explain the concepts when Cora got stuck. After that first time, they didn’t count the occasional half hour of tutoring on Stiles’ time sheets, mostly because Stiles finished his work with Peter in well under the eight hours he was supposed to work. He spent some of the time reading books aloud to Peter, borrowing some from the rest of the family when he couldn’t stand Peter’s selection anymore. 

One morning, Derek helped Stiles lift Peter out of bed and into his wheelchair so that Stiles could change the bedsheets. Derek could have done it himself easily, but he didn’t want Stiles to know about supernatural strength, so they lifted the limp man together. 

“Call me when you need help putting him back into bed,” Derek said. 

“I thought I might wheel him out onto the porch for a bit,” Stiles said. “It’s a nice day and he probably hasn’t seen the sun in a while.” 

Derek wasn’t sure if Stiles was genuinely considering Peter’s possible awareness, or just looking for an excuse. He remembered the way Stiles had looked when they’d walked out of the debtor’s prison together, the way he’d faced towards the sun. 

“You’re allowed to go out, you know,” Derek said. “If you want to take a walk in your downtime, no one’s going to stop you.” 

Stiles glanced down at his ankle. The cuff was hidden by his jeans but they both knew it was there. 

“Someone might call if I wander away from where I’m meant to be.” 

Derek smiled, “I’ll tell them you’re taking your patient to get some fresh air.” 

So it became part of Stiles’ normal routine to go for a short walk on his lunch break. A few times, when the day was warm, Stiles took Peter out onto the porch in his chair, and then sat in the sunlight to read to him. Derek occasionally left his bedroom window open while he worked so that Stiles’ gentle voice could wash over him. It was calming, for both of them. 

When he wasn’t helping Cora or out walking, Stiles spent his free time working on Derek’s computer, always in incognito mode so Derek had no idea if Stiles was taking his advice about review sites or doing something else entirely. 

Stiles was relaxing around them a bit. He was less wary, less inclined to ask permission about every little thing. He’d been with them about two weeks when he voluntarily addressed Laura. She was preparing her lunch one Sunday evening, bemoaning the fact she might not get to eat it because the lunch thief was still operating in the office. She commented that she’d love to catch the thief red handed. 

“Or blue handed,” Stiles said. 

“What?” Laura looked up from preparing her salad. 

“What you could do is make some cupcakes but then you cut out some of the cake from the middle and fill it with syrup.” 

“How does that help?” Laura asked. 

“If you have very runny syrup and you colour it with something. Food colouring’s the obvious thing, but dye might be better as long as it’s non-toxic; you don’t want to poison anyone. The thief takes a bite and suddenly they’ve got syrup spilling out all over their mouth and fingers, staining them with the colouring. You know who to blame because they’ll be the person trying to clean dye off their teeth.” 

Laura looked at Stiles for a moment longer and then started laughing. 

“You are a devious bastard, you know that,” she said, grinning. “Right. Time for cupcakes.” 

She decided to make it a family project. Cora excused herself by saying she had homework she hadn’t got round to yet, but Laura insisted Derek stay and help out. She found a recipe and went into full project manager mode, instructing Derek how much to weigh and when to mix and all the rest of it, while Stiles got on with making the syrup, dyed with a bright red food colouring because Laura was wedded to the idea of literally catching the thief red handed. 

“You should put a bit of the food colouring in the cake mixture,” Stiles said. “Otherwise some of the colour might leech through from the syrup and give the game away. We can make it look like a red velvet cupcake.” 

He was melting sugar on the stove, mixing it with water to make a very runny concoction. Derek had to get Stiles to move aside so he could put the cupcakes into the oven. Stiles looked at him, opened his mouth to say something, and then looked away, gnawing his lower lip. His eyes kept shifting back to Derek. 

“What?” Derek asked. 

“Nothing,” Stiles said. His cheeks were starting to turn as red as the syrup. 

Laura looked over and snorted, “You’ve got flour all over your face. How the hell did you manage that?” 

Derek slammed the oven door shut and went to wash his face, studying the mess in the bathroom mirror. There wasn’t flour all over his face. There was a little smear on one cheek and a tiny bit on his nose, nothing to justify Laura’s mocking attitude. Derek cleaned it off and went back to the kitchen to watch Laura prepare the frosting. She was also asking Stiles how he came up with the idea and Stiles told a story about how he and his friend Scott used to get stuff nicked from their lunches by a bully who thought he was untouchable. 

“His dad was this big shot district attorney so of course the school did nothing when we complained about him bullying us, so we had to get our own revenge. We made a batch of dye cupcakes and brought a whole tin of them into school. He stole them and gave them out to all his jerk friends. The colouring went everywhere and we spiked the dye with eye drops to make it taste vile and he thought he’d been poisoned. He tried to get us arrested for poisoning him but in doing so he basically admitted to stealing our food. It wasn’t like the cops would arrest him because of daddy dearest, but they gave him a warning for wasting their time and he got a detention. Better yet, he didn’t touch our food after that.” 

Laura chuckled, “You are not a person to cross.” 

“My dad always said if I didn’t follow him into law enforcement I’d make one hell of a criminal.” Stiles’ smile froze an instant after the words left his lips, as if he’d only just realised what he said. That scent of despair washed over the kitchen, overwhelming the smell of the cooking cupcakes. 

“Your dad was in law enforcement?” Laura asked. Her tone was gentle. She’d recognised the shift in mood. 

“County sheriff.” 

“What happened to him?” 

“Shot in the line of duty. Robbery went wrong and he took two to the chest. Major surgery and a lot of complications. They kept saying he was going to pull through until he didn’t.” 

“I’m sorry,” Derek said. He wondered about reaching out, about putting a hand on Stiles’ shoulder or something, but he wasn’t sure how the gesture would be received, so he kept his distance. Stiles just nodded. Then his mood seemed shift again, but the smile he plastered on his face didn’t match his scent. 

“Come on,” he said, “these cupcakes aren’t going to bake themselves.” 

***

“Can you keep a secret?” Stiles’ voice was quiet and the door to Peter’s room was shut. There was no way anyone with human hearing would be able to tell what he was saying. Derek knew that he was wrong to listen in. Just because he had supernatural hearing didn’t mean it was OK to use it to spy on someone who thought he was just talking to a catatonic man. 

“Of course you can keep a secret,” Stiles continued. “You’re not going to tell anyone, are you?” 

Derek should stop listening. He should put his headphones on and play music and then maybe he’d stand a chance of being a decent person. He even got so far as reaching for his headphones but the next few words slipped into his ears despite his decision not to listen. 

“Your nephew’s cute.” 

And Derek froze, hands holding the headphones halfway to his ears. Stiles was talking to Peter about him. 

“I mean,” Stiles continued, “he was all bad and scowly and that was all kinds of hot, like I could imagine him pushing me against the wall for angry sex, but that was just... you know... Then he had to go and be nice and think about ways I could pay off more of the debt and just live up to his promise not to be an asshole. I could handle him being hot and I could handle him being nice, and maybe I could even handle him being both of those together, but then we were making the cupcakes and he got flour on his nose and it was just adorable. He’s not allowed to be adorable as well. I definitely can’t handle hot and nice _and_ adorable.” 

Derek lowered the headset. Stiles was interested in him. That knowledge came out of nowhere. Stiles had been more relaxed around him than Laura or Cora since day one, but that was a long way from what Stiles was talking about now. Stiles _liked_ him. 

“This situation is so messed up,” Stiles said, and Derek couldn’t help agreeing. “Derek is my boss and this gig is about as good as it gets for debtors. If I make him uncomfortable, he could send me back and I could end up in some sweatshop working sixteen hour days and being made to pay jacked up prices for clothes and bedding and anything else they can think of, being fined for looking at someone the wrong way. Here, I actually stand a chance of paying off the debt. Risk verses reward. If Derek figures out I’m into him and gets creeped out, I could be stuck in the system forever.” 

There was another reason this was screwed up. Stiles was under Derek’s power. Only a couple of weeks ago, Stiles had been scared to say the wrong thing in case he was punished for it. If Derek tried anything, Stiles might go along with it because he was scared of the consequences of saying no. Derek had told Stiles back in the interview room that he wasn’t going to rape him. He intended to keep that promise. He might eavesdrop on Stiles’ conversations but he wouldn’t do anything to Stiles or anyone else without full and complete consent. Right now, Derek held all the power between them and that meant complete consent was impossible. 

He wouldn’t take advantage of a situation like this. He might be despicable enough to listen in on Stiles’ conversations, but he wasn’t despicable enough to do that. He wasn’t Kate.


	5. Chapter 5

“You are an evil genius,” Laura told Stiles as soon as she returned from work. 

“The cupcakes worked?” Stiles asked. They’d only prepared a couple of the rigged cupcakes. The rest were perfectly ordinary cakes ready for them to eat, but Laura had taken the specially prepared ones in to work that day. 

“I left them in the break room in clear sight. I even took a photo. When I went to get my morning coffee, one of the cakes had a bite taken out of it and there was red everywhere. I found Amanda in the bathroom trying to wash red out of her blouse. I took photos of her and the cake as well and sent it to HR. She tried to explain that I’d had two cakes so it shouldn’t matter that she’d taken one, and she basically ended up confessing to stealing it.” 

“What will happen now?” Stiles asked. 

“I have no idea, but I doubt Amanda will be touching my food again.” Laura grinned at him. “Thank you, Stiles.” 

“I guess this would be a good time to ask for a favour,” Stiles said. 

Derek looked up from where he was preparing dinner, surprised that Stiles would actually dare to ask for something. This was a good sign. Stiles might have waited until he’d done something Laura was thrilled at before he asked, but at least he felt able to ask. 

“What is it?” Laura asked. 

“I have a friend who wants to see me. Would it be OK if he came here to visit? It would be on a Sunday afternoon, after I’ve done my work. I promise, it won’t interfere with me helping Peter and I’ll make sure he’s only here during my downtime and ...” Stiles looked like he could carry on making long reassurances but Derek cut him off. 

“Of course your friend can come,” he said. 

“Of course,” Laura echoed. 

“Stiles,” Derek continued, “you’re hired to work here but you’re not a slave. What you do in your free time is up to you.” 

Stiles looked like he might argue the point about being a slave, but he just nodded, smiling a little. 

“Will your friend want to stay for dinner?” Derek asked. 

Stiles hesitated, “Would there be a cost?” 

“No.” This time it was Laura who spoke. They both knew by now how careful Stiles was about money, not risking a single cent. “We’re not going to make you pay for your friend to eat dinner.” 

Stiles smiled again, “Thanks. Yeah. I’d like that.” 

“Do you need to borrow my phone?” Derek asked. He already had the phone out of his pocket and held out towards Stiles. Stiles took it and left the kitchen. With Laura sitting right there, Derek really couldn’t listen in this time. 

“How the hell did a kid like him end up so in debt he got caught in the system?” Laura asked. 

“I’ve been asking myself that since I met him.” 

“Something to do with his dad?” 

Derek remembered the conversation they’d had over cupcake baking, “Maybe. He did make a comment to me about medical bills when I was talking about Peter’s situation.” 

“It doesn’t seem right. His dad was a law enforcement officer. He got shot and now his kid’s stuck paying off medical debt?” 

Derek took the pasta off the stove and drained it out, his mind going back to that first day when he’d gone to find a carer for Stiles. 

“I think the woman in charge of his case feels the same way,” Derek said. “Stiles has talked about how awful some of the other places debtors work are. I think that woman pushed him to us because she thought this would be better for him.” 

“It’s not right,” Laura said again. Derek nodded. 

“It’s not like we can do much. We can give him a bonus now and then but it’s not like we can pay off his debt for him.” The best they could do was treat him like a person, give him rights and freedom as much as they could under the system. 

Laura glanced towards the door, “Maybe we’re not the only people who want to help him.” 

***

Derek was reading on the porch on Sunday so he was the first to hear the roar of the motorbike engine. He set aside him book and looked up as the bike came up the rough road to the house. The driver, when he parked, turned out to be a teenager about the same age as Stiles. He had a rucksack on his back that was bulging from its contents. The boy set his helmet aside and looked with suspicion towards Derek. 

“Hi,” Derek said. 

“Hi,” the boy replied. Then the front door opened. Stiles barrelled down the porch, nearly tripping over his feet as he flung himself at the new arrival. They hugged tightly. 

“Hey,” said Stiles, still hugging. 

“Hey,” replied the other boy. Derek wondered if he should go back to his book. He might get through another couple of pages before the two stopped hugging. 

“I missed you,” Stiles said. 

“You too.” 

Eventually, the two stepped apart. Stiles turned back to the house. 

“This is Derek. Derek, this is my bro Scott.” 

“Nice to meet you,” said Derek. Scott just nodded, that suspicious look still on his face. By then, Laura and Cora had come out of the house and Stiles introduced them too. Scott nodded again. Stiles looked between them all, the tension clear. 

“Come on,” he said to Scott, “let’s go for a walk.” 

“Are you allowed to do that?” Scott asked. 

“I’m an indentured worker, not property,” Stiles said. “And I’m off duty.” 

Scott didn’t look convinced but he followed Stiles away under the trees. Laura met Derek’s eyes and jerked her head significantly towards the house. Derek stood to follow, but not before he heard Scott telling Stiles, “Mom insisted on me bringing a care package. We kept a few things, stuff that the authorities decided wasn’t worth selling.” 

Scott was already shrugging the backpack off as Derek shut the door. 

***

Derek spent the afternoon failing to read. He didn’t believe Stiles was trying to run away. Risk verses reward, Stiles talked about, and running was all risk. The fines, the punishment, the risk of losing a job where he could act like a human being, weighed against the slim chance of being able to take the cuff off his ankle and stay under the radar. Stiles wouldn’t risk it. Derek knew that Stiles would come back, so why was he so nervous about the kid being out there with his friend? 

He breathed a sigh of relief when Stiles returned to the house after about an hour. He was wearing a red hoodie that Derek had never seen before. Presumably this was part of the care package. Stiles took Scott through to Peter’s room, holding the backpack with whatever else it contained. Derek fixed his eyes on the book in front of him and tried not to listen in on the words drifting through from the other room. He wasn’t very successful. 

“This is Peter,” Stiles said. “Peter, meet my best friend Scott. Say hi, Scott.” 

“Um, hi,” Scott said. 

“Peter isn’t the chatty type.” 

“Is he... aware of us?” 

“Dunno. Most people don’t seem to think so, but I figure it doesn’t hurt anyone to talk to him like he is. Please it means I get to talk to someone who doesn’t tell me to shut up.” 

“And this is where you sleep?” 

“Yeah,” Stiles said. “Not the most comfortable bed in the world but it does.” 

“I’ve seen you asleep half falling off a couch. You can sleep anywhere.” 

“No one ever accused me of being the princess and the pea.” 

They talked for a while about innocuous things. Scott asked Stiles more about his living conditions and the way he was treated. From the way they were talking, this was a continuation of whatever conversations they’d had out in the woods. Derek was able to focus back on the book in his hands. He needed to stop listening in on Stiles. Stiles had gone through enough and deserved better. 

Derek read for a bit and then went into the kitchen to start making dinner. He’d bought steaks, good quality ones, wanting to do something nice for Stiles and his friend. It was a treat for all of them and soon the kitchen was filled with the scent of cooking meat. 

When everyone came through to the kitchen, Scott’s eyes fell on the steaks. He looked up at Derek. 

“You’d better not be adding to Stiles’ debt with this.” 

Derek rolled his eyes. He could see why Stiles had referred to this guy as his brother. 

“Relax,” he said. “This one’s on us.” 

“They’re not assholes,” Stiles said. Derek couldn’t help a smile, thinking of a previous conversation when Stiles had been unconvinced of exactly that. It was nice to know he was changing Stiles’ mind. Scott didn’t look convinced though. 

“They’re participating in a corrupt system,” he said. 

“We’re just looking after our uncle,” Cora snapped, glaring at Scott across the table. “Don’t blame us because the world sucks.” 

“How much are you paying Stiles?” Scott asked. “Two dollars an hour?” 

Derek wanted to argue with that but Scott was right. They’d hired Stiles because getting a debtor was cheap. That didn’t make it fair for Stiles. 

“Would you rather we send him back into the program?” Laura asked. 

“Guys!” Stiles cut in, before Scott could say anything else. “The system stinks. The cost of real medical care stinks. The whole state of the economy stinks. You know what doesn’t stink? These steaks. Can we just eat?” 

The meal passed uncomfortably. Scott didn’t like any of them. Cora didn’t respond well to being disliked. No one was particularly happy, though Stiles tried to keep conversation going through comments about the food or the weather. 

At the end of the meal, Scott said he had to leave. 

“Could I get a minute with you first?” Derek asked. Stiles gave him a confused look but he didn’t argue. Scott looked suspicious as he followed Derek out of the house. 

“If you’re going to harm Stiles,” Scott started. Derek shook his head and held out a piece of paper. Scott eyed it, but he reached out for it. The paper had numbers written on it. 

“That’s the number for Stiles’ account,” Derek said. “Any money paid into that account gets taken off his debt. We can’t afford to bail him out but maybe there are other people who care about what happens to him.” 

“Why did you want to talk about this without Stiles?” 

“You can tell him if you want, but I know he told you to worry about your own bills. Stiles is a good guy. He doesn’t deserve what’s happening to him.” 

“I doubt many people in the program deserve what’s happening to them,” Scott said. He looked down at the bit of paper. “I’ll see what I can do. Right now, I should say goodbye to him.” 

“Come and see him whenever you want,” Derek said. Scott’s suspicion hadn’t vanished entirely, but he nodded and then headed back inside the house to say farewell to his friend.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I won't be updating tomorrow because I'll be busy with work stuff, but at least I didn't leave you on a horrible cliffhanger... this time. :)

Derek wasn’t sure what made him start searching the internet for background on Stiles, but the first thing he noticed was that all the top results were from the Beacon Hills Times. He shouldn’t be surprised that Stiles came from the same place the Hales did; it was the nearest town of any significant size. Laura had wanted to stay near their traditional territory and the indentured servitude program people wouldn’t have had any reason to ship Stiles long distances, so this barely counted as a coincidence. Still, it was strange to see that town name on all the articles. 

Stiles’ dad had been sheriff of Beacon Hills. The shooting had been a headline article on the local paper. There had been a couple of mentions in some of the national papers, but all of the follow ups were in Beacon Hills, talking about the trial of the man arrested for shooting Sheriff Stilinski. The only mention of Stiles was in the obituary, and even then it wasn’t by name. All the paper said was that the sheriff was leaving behind a sixteen-year-old son. There was no mention anywhere of debts or that sixteen-year-old son ending up in servitude. It was like everyone had forgotten that Stiles existed. 

Only when Derek specifically searched for Stiles and indentured servitude did he find a relevant result, and it wasn’t what he expected. There was a long article on a liberal politics site written by one Stiles Stilinski entitled _The Economics of Indentured Servitude_. It had been published two days ago and included a lot of information about how the program worked, including details on the interest rates and fines and mandatory purchases that were designed to prolong the debts as long as possible. 

_Those who run the program claim it’s designed to deter people from building up unsustainable debts and to stop other citizens having to bear the brunt of them, but the fact is that they want people to be in debt. As long as people are in debt, the program can make a fortune out of them._

There were statistics. There were charts. There was a table listing items that all debtors were forced to purchase when working for a major retailer. Every debtor they hired was expected to buy a uniform, bedding, toiletries, equipment, and other items, and they had to buy them from their employer. This added up to massive profits for the employer and a significant increase of debt. The debtors were even expected to pay for the tracking cuffs they were fitted with. 

_When a debtor is sent to a new employer, all these mandatory purchases, combined with the appallingly low wages within the program, mean that the individual’s debt is often several hundred dollars higher at the end of their first week than when they started. The high interest rates compound this problem and the employer can add arbitrary fines should a debtor appear to be making too much progress with paying off what they owe. Employers are notified when a debtor is close to paying off their remaining debt, and many unscrupulous organisations deliberately apply fines in order to keep the indentured worker trapped in the system._

There were more statistics, talking about the average length of time a person remained in the program after reaching that three-month-remaining milestone. Across the program it was about two years, but Stiles had managed to find some figures for a clothing manufacturer, where debtors stayed working for them for up to ten years after the company received that three month notification. 

Stiles moved on from talking about the problems of the individual to the problems of the economy as a whole. Large organisations were hiring debtors to avoid paying the minimum wage for free workers, meaning there were less jobs for ordinary workers, less disposable income in circulation, and so even more businesses getting into trouble and cutting jobs for normal workers. The whole thing formed a vicious cycle in which more and more people were likely to end up in debt and getting sucked into the program. 

_The CEOs of major companies love the system because they can cut wages and make huge profits. Those running the program love it because they can make huge profits off interest rates, fees, and fines. But for everyone else in America? This program is crippling the economy and trapping ordinary men and women in this modern flavour of slavery._

Derek read the whole article twice. He even clicked on some of the links that Stiles had included as citations. He’d heard Stiles talk about the problems of the program, but he’d assumed it was just exaggeration or a few bad employers causing issues, but the way Stiles laid it out in this article showed a system rotten to its core. It was a system built around the exploitation of the vulnerable. 

At least now Derek knew what Stiles had been doing on his computer. He’d been constructing detailed articles that attacked the foundation of the institution that held him prisoner. Derek pushed himself back from the computer and walked downstairs. 

Stiles was in Peter’s room as usual, sitting on the bed at Peter’s feet and reading aloud from one of the books that had been part of Scott’s care package. 

“’And it came to pass that in time the Great God Om spake unto Brutha the Chosen One.’” Stiles looked up, and whatever the Great God Om might have said was replaced with, “Oh hey, Derek. Something wrong?” 

The entire system, Derek was tempted to say. 

“Nothing’s wrong. I read your article.” 

“Oh.” Stiles looked nervous. Derek wondered if there were any fines on the list that would cover this situation. 

“You certainly had a lot of detail in there,” Derek said. 

“Yeah, well, that site pays a cent per word. I was tempted to go full Dickens and pad the crap out of that piece. I actually had a section on human rights and the constitution but the editor cut it because she said I’d wandered off topic and was supposed to be talking about economics. I might right a follow-up on that.” 

“You didn’t mention anywhere that you’re actually a debtor yourself.” 

“Yeah, well, it’s a fine line. If I include that, it shows I know what I’m talking about but it also opens the door to people saying I’m just griping and that people shouldn’t listen to me because I’m clearly biased.” 

“Or maybe it will give a human connection. The statistics and charts are useful, but maybe a human story would resonate more. If you talk about personal experiences, it might feel more real.” 

Stiles shook his head, “People can dismiss a personal story as a fluke. I can talk about the woman I met who took out a fifty-dollar loan to buy her kids Christmas presents and ended up in the system for two years, but people will just go, ‘Oh, it’s sad for her but most of the people in the program deserve it because they’re lazy deadbeats’.” 

Derek flinched at that last word. It was a word that hurt because Derek knew he’d thought it. 

“What’s wrong?” Stiles asked. 

“That’s what I thought,” Derek admitted. “That’s what I was expecting. A deadbeat.” 

“Yeah, well, stereotypes are a bitch that way.” Stiles’ voice was suddenly filled with bitterness. He raised the book again, “Now, if you excuse me, I’m supposed to be looking after your uncle.” 

Derek wondered how the hell he’d managed to annoy Stiles more with what had been meant as an admission that he’d been wrong and the prelude to an apology. He wanted to say something else, to try and make things better, but he didn’t know what would sooth Stiles’ feelings and he had to say something quickly because Stiles had very definitely meant that last piece as a dismissal. 

“I’m sorry,” Derek settled for. He left before he could say anything else to make this go any more wrong. 

“So, where were we?” Stiles asked Peter. “Right. The Great God Om.” 

Derek went into the kitchen. He needed to hit something. No, he needed to beat something up. Really, really badly. 

***

“What’s wrong?” Laura asked the section she stepped into the house and the smell of freshly baked bread the filled the air. 

“What do you mean?” Derek asked. He carried on stirring the soup so he didn’t have to meet her eye. 

“You only bake bread when you want an excuse to pound something. What happened?” 

“Nothing.” 

“Deeereeek.” Laura’s voice was whining, pleading. 

“That voice hasn’t worked on me since I was six, Laura.” 

She crossed the kitchen and put a hand on his shoulder, “What’s wrong? What happened?” 

“I said something that upset Stiles.” 

“What?” 

“That’s the thing, I’m not sure. We were talking about the debtors program and he was saying something about how everyone stereotypes the people in it and I admitted that I’d believed the stereotypes before I met him and then he just shut me out. I don’t know why. I was telling him I’d been wrong but he just ended the conversation.” 

“And you just let the subject drop and came in here to beat up bread dough,” Laura concluded. 

“Yeah.” 

“So now Stiles is mad at you and you don’t know what to apologise for and so you’re mad too.” 

“Basically.” 

“How do you keep getting in these situations, Derek?” 

She left the kitchen. Derek prodded his soup and didn’t feel at all ashamed of eavesdropping this time. He wanted to understand. 

“So, Stiles,” Laura said, “Derek seems to think you’re mad at him.” 

Couldn’t she be remotely subtle about this? Derek glared at the floating lumps of carrot in his pot. 

“I’m not mad at him,” Stiles answered. 

“No?” 

“No.” 

“I guess that’s good. My brother’s not the best at communicating. It’s possible he misinterpreted something but if you were mad at him, just for future reference, you might want to spell it out for him. He’s not great at subtlety.” 

Like she was any one to talk. Derek wished he had something left to chop up for the soup. Just listening to this exchange made him want to decapitate something. 

“I’m not mad at Derek,” Stiles said again. 

“OK. I won’t mention it again,” Laura said. 

Despite Stiles’ reassurances, dinner that night was an uncomfortable affair. He didn’t speak much and Derek was in no mood for conversation either. Cora was at a friend’s house, supposedly studying, which meant Laura was sitting between the two guys, trying to keep the conversation going and having about as much success as Stiles did holding a dialogue with Peter. 

Derek dunked his homemade bread into his soup and tried to convince himself that this was for the best. If Stiles didn’t like him, then Derek wouldn’t be tempted to take advantage of the situation. Everyone won. 

“This is stupid,” Laura said, dropping her spoon into her bowl and glaring at them in turn. “Whatever is wrong, just say it. Yell at each other if you have to, just get it out into the open.” 

“I’m not mad at Derek,” Stiles said. Laura started to argue, but Stiles continued, “I’m not. I’m mad at the situation in general. Derek just happens to be a part of that.” 

“I’m sorry I believed the stereotypes,” Derek said. 

“Stereotypes are a bitch,” Stiles said. “And for the rest of my life, I’ll have to deal with people who believe that of me. Even if I get out the program, this will be on my record forever. That’s what I’m mad about.”


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> You'll be without an update again tomorrow - work stuff.

The day before the full moon, Derek always felt distracted and too full of energy, like there was an itch under his skin that wouldn’t let him focus on anything. He didn’t bother with work because he knew it would be a futile endeavour. He needed to move. He helped Stiles lift Peter into his chair so that Stiles could wash the sheets again, and then Derek went running, pounding through the trees around the house, looping along narrow trails, faster and faster. He kept his ears pricked for any human joggers who might be surprised by his frantic pace, and he dodged around the undergrowth, chasing nothing, feeling the power of the coming moon burning through him. His heart beat rapidly, pounding his blood through his veins, that power flowing to every part of him. 

He’d been sprinting for more than an hour when he finally felt he might be calm enough to go back to the house. He ran back in that direction. He could always continue with press-ups or pull-ups or something if this still wasn’t enough. 

He kept listening, picking up birds and small creatures, the distant cars along the roads that skirted the woods. He heard Stiles’ voice, muffled by the walls of the house, only audible because of the volume of his words. 

“Holy crap!” 

There was surprise in Stiles’ voice, maybe alarm. Derek raced faster, pushing himself beyond the pace he’d just been running at until his lungs ached from the effort. He burst into the clearing and leapt onto the porch without bothering with the steps. Only when he opened the door did he hear Stiles’ voice again, softer now. 

“Peter? Can you hear me? Peter, look at me.” 

Peter was sat in his wheelchair as Derek had left him, but Stiles was standing right next to him, crouching down so his face was close to Peter’s. Stiles was looking at Peter with an almost pleading expression and Derek could still hear the way Stiles’ heart was racing. 

“Stiles?” Derek asked. “Did something happen?” 

Stiles straightened, turning to Derek and then back to the motionless Peter. 

“I... maybe... I don’t know... I probably imagined it.” 

“Imagined what?” Derek asked. He took another step into the room, studying Peter carefully, trying to see any sign that something was different, but aside from the fresh sheets, the room was just as it had been when he’d gone out for his run. 

“I was talking to him while I changed the sheets,” Stiles said, “like I usually do, and then I looked up and he was staring straight at me. At least, he looked like he was. His eyes were aimed right at my face but I wasn’t paying attention to where he was looking before then so maybe I just happened to step into his line of sight and it just looked like he was looking at me. He hasn’t moved since then. It was probably nothing. I tried moving and his eyes are still staring where they were before. I was just testing, seeing if he could change what he was looking at but it didn’t seem to work. I said I probably imagined it.” 

It would be easy to do. Peter stared vacantly ahead of him. It would be easy enough for Stiles to stand in that direction and believe he was staring at him. But maybe Stiles had been right. Derek couldn’t just ignore the possibility. 

Derek moved over to the chair, crouching where Stiles had been moments before. Peter’s eyes were staring past Derek into nothing. Derek put a hand on Peter’s, feeling the slight warmth to his skin. 

“Peter,” Derek said, “if you can hear me, give me a sign. It doesn’t have to be much. Move your eyes towards me. Twitch a finger. Anything. Give us a sign.” 

Derek tried not to hope. Hope was too painful because every time it turned out to be based on nothing. But still that resilient spark of belief began to stir into a flame. Stiles could have been right. This might be the start of Peter healing properly. 

But the figure in the chair remained motionless. The eyes stayed staring at nothing. The hand was still beneath his fingers. 

“Peter?” Derek said again, pleading now. “Just some little sign.” 

But Peter might as well have been a statue. 

Derek let out a long breath as that hope dwindled to ash again. 

“I’m sorry,” Stiles said. 

“No. It’s not your fault.” 

Derek straighten, releasing Peter’s hand. 

“I shouldn’t have said anything,” Stiles continued. 

“No. I want to know. Even if it’s just a coincidence or turns out to be nothing, I want to know.” 

Derek felt buzzing with energy again, frustrated at his own foolishness at daring to believe, even for a moment. He went into the living room and started doing press-ups on the floor in front of the couch. He didn’t bother counting, he just wanted to work his muscles until they were too tired to hold him up. He wanted them to burn these feelings out of him. 

***

Laura was home a little early. She often was on full moon days. Stiles was in the living room with Derek’s laptop while Derek prepared dinner. He was still thinking about the incident with Peter that morning. He hadn’t been able to get it out of his mind all day. Presumably that was written on his face or in his scent, because Laura seemed to know something was up the instant she joined him in the kitchen. 

“What is it?” she asked. 

Derek had been wondering how much to tell Laura and it seemed he would have little choice but to tell her everything. She’d get it out of him one way or another. 

“Something happened today,” he said. “Or didn’t happen. Even Stiles thought it might have just been a coincidence and he’s the one who saw it.” 

“Saw what? Did something happen to Peter?” 

Derek heard that slight trace of hope that slipped into her tone and quickly shook his head, “Probably not.” He explained how Stiles had thought Peter was looking at him, but how neither of them had managed to get any other reaction out of Peter afterward. 

“If he really had managed to focus on Stiles,” Derek said, “why didn’t he look at either of us after that? It probably was a coincidence but it got me a little spooked.” 

“Maybe.” 

“Laura, he was the same as ever when I checked on him.” Derek didn’t want her getting her hopes up like he had. 

“If this was any other day, I’d believe that, but for this to happen right before the full moon? If Peter was going to show any signs of life, it would be on the full moon. I want to take him out tonight.” 

They’d done this before, back when Peter first starting showing signs of healing. They took him out into the woods under the light of the full moon. They’d surrounded him with pack. Laura had shifted into her alpha form and howled to him, tried to make him shift. It had resulted in nothing but shattered hopes and disappointment. 

“What about Stiles?” Derek asked. “How do we explain it to him?” 

“We won’t.” 

“He’s a smart guy. He’ll notice something weird is going on.” 

“Not if you distract him. Take him out of the house for a few hours. Cora and I will handle Peter.” 

“Where am I supposed to take him?” Derek asked. 

“Anywhere. Just give us a couple of hours after moonrise; we’ll know by then if anything’s working and Peter will be all tucked up in bed by the time you bring Stiles home.” 

Derek didn’t want to miss whatever it was Laura had planned, and he didn’t like being away from the pack during the full moon, but this was the best way to keep their secret safe, so he accepted his alpha’s instructions. After dinner, he told Stiles to grab his hoodie. 

“Why?” Stiles asked, even as he did as he was told. 

“We’re going out for a bit,” Derek answered. 

“Out where?” 

“You’ll see.” Derek had to be evasive because he didn’t know where the hell he ought to take Stiles that wouldn’t be instantly suspicious. The logical thought would be to take him to a restaurant, but they’d just had dinner. A bar or club was out of the question. Most shops would be shut up for the night except for the big box stores, and Derek couldn’t think how he would explain a visit there to Stiles. He could take Stiles to a movie, but he didn’t know times or what was even on. He should have thought this through better. 

Stiles followed Derek out towards the car. The air was chilly with the falling night. Stiles was pulling his hoodie closer about him as he slid into the passenger seat of the Camaro. 

“Not even a hint about where we’re going?” Stiles asked, buckling his seatbelt. 

Derek put the car into gear and started to pull out, “You’ve never even heard of patience, have you?” 

He meant it as a joke, a way to put Stiles at ease, but it had the opposite effect. Stiles looked suddenly scared. 

“Oh god,” he said. “You’re taking me back, aren’t you?” 

“What?” Derek asked. 

“I’m sorry. I know you were upset about the thing with Peter today but it was a mistake. I’ll be more careful in the future. I won’t jump to any conclusions. Whatever you do, please don’t tell them I’m imagining things because if they think I’m crazy they’ll send me for psychiatric assessment and that will cost a fortune and I know that they’ll make me pay for it. Look, I’m sorry.” 

“Stiles, shut up.” Derek snapped a little harder than he’d meant to, but he needed Stiles to stop freaking out. Stiles stopped babbling and drew in a shaking breath. He sounded like he might start crying. Derek needed to calm things down and quickly. Why the hell couldn’t Laura have done this? She was so much better at people than he was. 

“I’m not getting rid of you, Stiles,” Derek said. 

“Then what’s this about?” 

“You spend far too much time stuck in a room with a guy in a coma.” 

“That’s pretty much my job. Not sure why you’d have a problem with that.” Stiles was starting to lean towards sarcasm again. This was probably a good sign. 

“The problem is that it’s not healthy for you. You need a break.” 

“I could cite religion and get Sundays off, but then I’d miss out on eight hours of wages a week. I made my choice.” 

“Well, tonight you’re getting a break.” 

Which meant Derek had to think of somewhere fun that would still be open by the time they reached town. There was a bookshop that was open until eleven. He could let Stiles buy a couple of books he wouldn’t complain about and, while Stiles browsed, he could check for local entertainment spots on his phone. 

“Sorry for freaking out,” Stiles said. 

“Sorry for scaring you.” Derek would have to remember in future how easily spooked Stiles was. He was under a lot of stress with his situation, overreacting was hardly surprising. 

“Sorry for messing you around with the Peter thing.” 

“Don’t be. Even if it’s a mistake, if you think you’ve noticed something going on with him, I want to know.” 

“OK.” 

Stiles seemed surprised when Derek parked in front of a bookshop, but he was pleased, especially when Derek told him to go and choose a couple of books. 

“I’m sick of you complaining about my uncle’s collection,” Derek added. Stiles flashed a grin and then disappeared away between the shelves. The second he was out of sight, Derek had his phone out, searching for anything else nearby. He had a plan ready by the time Stiles returned with a novel and a book about mistakes in science reporting. 

“Sorry I took so long,” Stiles said, “I couldn’t make up my mind.” 

“No, it’s fine. This was supposed to be about you.” 

As Derek turned to take the books to the register, he heard Stiles mutter, “God, why do you have to be _nice_?” 

It sounded like a complaint, which made very little sense to Derek. He couldn’t understand why Stiles would be upset about him being nice. After everything he’d been through, he deserved someone to treat him nicely for once. 

From the bookshop, Derek took Stiles to an arcade. He regretted his choice instantly, stepping into the noise and flashing lights. Everything was overwhelming. The smell of people and the rushing around of kids, the beeps and music of the machine, the fast food scents pervading the air from the concessions stand. He wanted to run out of there as quickly as he’d come, but Stiles was grinning. 

“Oh my god! I’ve not played this game for years!” He went to a shooting game. Unlike some of the other games, with their images of zombies and monsters, this one had cute cartoon targets, like a flight of ducks, or little bubbles that floated up from the bottom of the screen. Seeing the expression on Stiles’ face, Derek had no choice but to go and get change from the machine near the entrance. He planned to just give Stiles the pile of quarters and then make a break for the calmer environment of the parking lot, but Stiles stuck in the second coin and handed the player two gun over to Derek. 

“Watch out,” Stiles said. “I used to kick Scott’s ass at this game.” 

Stiles started the game and a swarm of bees started to buzz lazily about the screen. Stiles picked them off rapidly, while Derek managed to get a couple of shots off. It was hard to focus on the screen in front of him when there were so many things going on around him, so many voices and noises and the electronic music that came from everywhere all at once in a clashing cacophony. 

“You’ll get the hang of it,” Stiles said, when the round ended and Derek had a score of three against Stiles’ twenty-seven. 

The next screen had the ducks that had been on the game’s preview. Derek did better this time, but Stiles still dominated all the rounds until he alone got into the game’s final round and had thirty seconds to shoot the animated gophers that popped up from their holes for a couple of seconds at a time before disappearing back down. 

As the last of the little gophers exploded on the screen, Stiles pumped the air in victory, the smile still shining on his face. It was hard to believe that this was the same guy who talked about psychology and brain trauma with such authority. He’d never looked more like a kid then while running between shiny, noisy games machines trying to work out what to play next. Derek abandoned his plan to retreat to the parking lot because there was something enchanting about Stiles’ smile. Maybe it was the fact he was lit on all sides by lights in every colour of the rainbow. Maybe it was that Stiles seemed relaxed and happy for the first time since Derek had met him. Maybe it was the full moon overhead. Whatever it was, it made Derek want to enjoy this moment, to preserve it in his memories forever. 

When they headed back to the car, Stiles was still smiling, his face flushed pink from his flailing performance on the DDR machine. He was breathing heavily, heart beating rapidly, and that rosy glow shining on his cheeks. That was the moment Derek knew he was doomed. Something about Stiles’ appearance filled Derek’s mind with the image of Stiles flushed for another reason, breathless and panting under less innocent circumstances. It was just for an instant, but Derek wondered what it would be like to take Stiles to bed. 

That thought was followed instantly by a surge of guilt. Stiles was several years younger than him and in an incredibly vulnerable position. Derek was sick for even considering it. 

“Are you OK?” Stiles asked. 

“Yeah,” Derek lied. “Just a headache from all the noise in there.” 

“Well, thanks for putting up with it as long as you did. I had fun.” 

“Good. That’s what I wanted.” 

He couldn’t forget though that tonight had had another purpose. He’d received a text from Laura, a sad faced emoji and the message that nothing had happened with Peter. Derek hadn’t really hoped for anything else, but still he found he was disappointed.


	8. Chapter 8

“What did you do?” Stiles asked Derek, about five minutes after Derek had handed his laptop over for the afternoon. 

“What?” Derek asked. He genuinely had no idea what Stiles was talking about. Derek was chopping up chicken to make a casserole and Stiles now stood in the kitchen doorway, fixing him with a serious stare. 

“I’ve noticed your little bonuses, thanks for those by the way, but three hundred and twenty seven dollars? What the hell’s that about? It’s such a random amount.” 

“Stiles, I think you need to explain a bit more if you want me to answer anything.” 

“So you have no idea about a random deposit on my account for three hundred and twenty seven dollars?” Stiles asked. 

“Nope, but you might want to your friend Scott about it. I gave him the account codes.” Derek didn’t feel at all bad about dumping Scott in it because Stiles was bound to figure it out and, if it was Scott, the guy deserved credit for helping his friend. At least, that’s what he thought when he said it. He changed his mind a little when Stiles’ expression changed to one of fury. 

“You did what?” Stiles yelled. “I need to call Scott.” 

He crossed the kitchen and stuck a hand into Derek’s pocket to grab his phone. Derek’s hands were covered in raw chicken so there wasn’t much he could do to stop Stiles and he just stood there, surprised, as Stiles groped inside his pants. Stiles didn’t even seem to notice the inappropriate closeness of the situation. Moments later, Stiles had the phone in hand and was already entering the number. 

For once, Derek didn’t feel any guilt about listening because Stiles paced around the kitchen while he made his call, talking loudly enough that people in town could probably hear him. 

“What the hell, Scott?” Stiles demanded. “Three hundred dollars? You don’t have that kind of money to throw around. What happens the next time your mom needs to make a mortgage payment? Seriously, are you out of your mind? You don’t want to end up like me.” 

“Stiles!” Scott’s voice was a yell as well, cutting across Stiles’ rage. 

Stiles pulled the phone away from his ear for a moment at the noise and then he asked, “Well?” 

“Only about five dollars of that money was from me,” Scott said. 

“Then where did the rest come from?” 

“I went to the sheriff’s station to talk to the deputies and the new sheriff. They did a whip round for funds. And I convinced Deaton to put a collection tin in the clinic. I even collected some at school until Harris stopped me; apparently we’re not allowed to do fundraisers without explicit permission from the school. But even Lydia Martin put in ten bucks before I was stopped.” 

“Lydia gave you money to help me?” 

Derek was left wondering who this Lydia was, because the mention of her name was cause for such amazement in Stiles’ voice. 

“Stiles,” Scott continued, “there are a lot of people who want to help you. Danny’s promised to put together a GoFundMe page for you.” 

“So I’m the town’s charity case?” 

Stiles should have been happy about this. People were helping him pay off the debt he feared would be insurmountable, yet he sounded bitter. Derek wanted to go over there and give him a hug, but he still had chicken everywhere and Stiles was talking to Scott, not to him. 

“Your dad died a hero,” Scott said. “People know that. They know what happened to you isn’t right. We’re going to keep the collecting tin at Deaton’s and I was going to ask Mrs McGreggor in the butcher’s if she’ll have one too; she’s always liked you. Once we get the donation page running, we should be able to get some more money. We’ll get you out of this, Stiles.” 

“Thanks.” The word sounded hollow. 

“I’m not going to abandon you.” 

“Thanks,” Stiles said again, just as despondent. He hung up the call. He sank into a chair and stared at the phone he still held. Once again, Derek wondered if he ought to go over there and hug him. 

“Needing help isn’t the end of the world,” Derek said. 

“No. I know that. This is great. Just what I needed really. Scott’s an amazing friend and this is brilliant.” Despite his words, Stiles’ tone stayed lifeless. Sad. Derek tried to think of something to say that would take that tone away, something that would make Stiles feel happy about what was happening here. 

“You’re not a charity case,” he said. 

“You’re only saying that because you didn’t hear Scott saying that they’ve literally got charity collection tins for me,” Stiles said. 

“That doesn’t mean you’re charity.” 

Stiles answered that with a disbelieving look and a raised eyebrow. Once more, Derek wished he were better with words. Better with people in general. He hunted his mind for anything he could say that might make Stiles feel better. 

“Laura works full time so I can finish my degree,” Derek said. “I’m doing it online because it’s cheaper but it’s still a lot of money and it’s all coming out of insurance pay outs and savings that belong to Laura as much as they do to me but she’s not getting any of the benefit out of it. Am I charity?” 

“No. I mean... that’s families. You’ll pay for stuff when you get a job with your degree, right?” 

Derek nodded, though he honestly had no idea what sort of job he could expect to get with a history degree. He knew he wasn’t going into academia because they might expect him to stand up in front of a room full of students and talk to them. He would probably end up working his ass off at some minimum wage job because he’d picked a major that was interesting instead of one that was practical. 

“You are working at hard as you can to pay back the debt,” Derek said, “but you know that the entire system is set up to make you fail. You’re not doing anything wrong by getting help.” 

“I guess.” It wasn’t much more enthusiastic than earlier. “But this is how they’re going to think of me for the rest of my life.” 

“Until you become a criminal mastermind and take over the world.” 

Stiles gave a little snort of laughter and Derek smiled. That was better. 

***

It seemed Stiles wasn’t the only one paying attention to the money going into his account, at least that was Derek’s interpretation of the supposedly random inspection that happened a couple of days later. A man showed up, introduced himself as Mr Grennich, and said that he was there to ensure that Stiles’ treatment was as it should be. 

“You’re new to the program,” Grennich said. “We’ve got to make sure everything’s above board. Keeps the liberals from whining.” 

Derek nodded, keeping his face stern and impassive. 

“I need you to show me Stilinski’s living quarters and work conditions,” Grennich said. 

“His work space and living space are the same,” Derek said. “Through here.” He spoke a little louder than was strictly necessary but not so loud as to be obvious. He just wanted to give Stiles a few seconds of warning. The last thing they needed would be for this inspector guy to see Stiles sitting reading. 

When Derek showed the man into the bedroom, Stiles had the bottom of Peter’s bedsheets pulled back and was attacking Peter’s toenails with a pair of scissors. Grennich frowned at him in confusion. 

“What’s he doing?” The question was addressed at Derek. 

“His job. Stiles’ work here is to take care of my uncle, who is incapable of looking after himself. Stiles does everything from feeding him to cleaning his teeth to changing his catheter. My uncle can’t even trim his own toenails.” Derek gestured towards the bed and the scissors. 

“And you’re satisfied with the quality of his work?” 

Stiles continued trimming the toenails without so much as a pause. Presumably he didn’t want to get caught slacking by the inspector. 

“Very satisfied,” Derek said. 

Grennich gave Stiles a long look and then a huff of acceptance. He marked something off on a form and then went to Stiles’ camp bed. He prodded it with a toe. 

“This where he sleeps?” 

“Yes.” The fact that they didn’t have another real bed in the house might count in their favour. They might not be instantly grouped with the hated liberals because it was obvious that Stiles’ living situation was less than five star. Most of Stiles’ belongings were tucked under the camp bed: a few items of clothing and the books Scott had brought him. Scott had brought a couple of framed photos as well and these stood on the windowsill, but Grennich would have no way to know that the people in those pictures were Stiles’ friends and family, not Peter’s. He didn’t so much as glance at them. 

Grennich went into the bathroom and made another note on his form before coming back and finally turned to Stiles, who’d moved on to Peter’s other foot. 

“Are you being fed?” he asked. 

“Yes, sir,” Stiles answered. 

“Three meals a day?” 

“Yes, sir.” 

“Any complaints about your employer?” 

“No, sir.” 

Of course that was the answer. Derek was standing less than two metres away. If Stiles were being starved and waterboarded, he would have given those same answers because the person who had complete power of him was standing right there. No one would give honest feedback about their employer with their employer listening in, let alone someone in as vulnerable a position as a debtor. This whole inspection was a sham, a way to show in reports that debtors weren’t being abused without actually doing anything to prevent abuse. 

Derek could have clawed Grennich’s eyes out and considered it a charitable deed. He had no doubt Grennich had seen living conditions a lot worse than the ones Stiles endured and marked down ‘no complaints’ on his stupid form. 

“Get on with your work,” Grennich said. 

“Yes, sir,” Stiles answered, though he hadn’t ever stopped working. 

Grennich nodded and left the room, Derek following after him. Derek closed the bedroom door and took Grennich through to the kitchen. He would have used the living room, but he didn’t want Grennich to have a comfortable seat. Sitting at the table, Grennich turned to another page of his form. 

“How many hours a day does Stiles work?” Grennich asked. 

“Eight. Occasionally he’s worked slightly more but I’ve marked it in his timesheet when that happens.” It had only happened once, but it was technically true. 

“And you haven’t noticed him doing anything inappropriate in his non-work time?” 

“Inappropriate?” 

“We’ve noticed some irregular funds in his account,” Grennich said. “We suspect he may be partaking in secondary work.” 

It was in the contracts and rules that a debtor could only work for their primary employer. Really, there was no sense to this rule except to keep people in the system, now that Derek thought about it. 

“He doesn’t have another job. Whenever he leaves this house, he’s with a member of the family.” That wasn’t quite true; Stiles took his lunchtime walks by himself, but Grennich didn’t need to know that. 

“When we see sporadic payments like this, it’s usually an indicator that there are illegal activities going on.” 

Derek looked at the man blankly. He had a good idea what Grennich was hinting at but he wanted the guy to have to spell it out. 

“Prostitution,” Grennich said at last. 

“Do a lot of debtors end up in the sex trade?” Derek asked. 

“The dirty scroungers whore themselves out on the side if you don’t keep a close eye on them.” 

Derek could believe it. These people were desperate, needing to find money in any way they could in order to break free of the system. Even those that didn’t get raped and abused probably ended up turning tricks out of necessity. But Grennich was putting on the blame for that on the people who were being ground between the cogs of a program that treated them like property. 

“Well, that’s not happening here,” Derek said. 

“There’s got to be some explanation for the payments on his account. I’m sure you’re a busy man. It might make sense for a troublemaker like this one to be put in a job where it’s easier to keep an eye on him.” 

“You want to take Stiles away?” Derek asked. 

From Peter’s bedroom, through the closed door between them, Derek heard Stiles’ voice saying, “Holy crap! What the hell?” 

He wanted to rush over there and see what was going on, but Grennich obviously hadn’t heard anything and Derek didn’t want to give this man any reason to believe there was anything wrong here. He couldn’t afford to give Grennich the slightest excuse. Derek fought to keep his face calm despite his fear and curiosity about what might be happening in Peter’s room. 

“Just until we’ve got to the bottom of these anomalous payments,” Grennich said. 

Derek forced himself to continue as though nothing was happening, “I believe a friend of his is collecting money from schoolmates, neighbours, the various law enforcement officers who worked with his father. I’m not aware that there’s anything illegal about his friends helping him pay his debt, is there?” 

The reminder about Stiles’ dad’s former occupation was deliberate. If Grennich or anyone else tried to tell a group of deputies that they weren’t allowed to help the son of their former boss, people were bound to ask why. As far as most people were concerned, the system existed to ensure that people paid back debts. The debtors were supposed to work for it, but there were no rules about the money coming from elsewhere. 

“Nothing illegal,” Grennich admitted. “If people want to throw their money away on some scrounging kid, they can.” 

“So there’s no reason to take Stiles somewhere else then?” Derek said. 

“I suppose not. If you’re sure you don’t want to swap him for someone less troublesome?” 

“I don’t want to have to teach someone else how to fit a catheter to my uncle’s cock,” Derek said. “I’m sure you understand.” 

“Right. Got it.” 

“Are we done here?” 

They were done. Derek signed an inspection form that said everything was up to standard and then showed Grennich out. He watched through the window as the car drove away, making sure the man was definitely gone before he headed into Peter’s room. Stiles was brushing Peter’s hair and it all would have seemed perfectly normal if not for the faint trembling in Stiles’ hands. 

“What’s wrong?” Derek asked. 

“Is that guy gone?” 

“Yeah. He’s gone.” 

“Good because I’ve got something really, really weird to show you.” Stiles set down the hairbrush and pulled back one side of the bedcovers to reveal Peter’s hand. Derek looked at it, seeing the pale skin and the trimmed nails. He looked up at Stiles in confusion, only to see bewilderment and horror on Stiles’ face. Stiles quickly pulled back the covers on the other side to show the other hand. 

“No. No. I didn’t imagine it. It was definitely real this time.” 

“Stiles, what did you see?” Derek asked. He was beginning to suspect. 

“This is going to sound completely crazy. You’re going to think I’m making this up.” 

“Stiles, I promise, whatever you tell me, I will believe.” 

Stiles was staring at Peter’s hand. Derek’s heart was racing in sudden excitement as he guessed what crazy story Stiles might be about to tell. 

“I was going to trim his nails and I pulled the cover back but it was like he had claws. They were about an inch long and sharp. I covered up his hand right away in case that inspector guy came back but I swear I saw them.” 

Derek didn’t doubt it for a minute. This meant Peter had partially transformed, and it couldn’t be a coincidence that it had happened right when Grennich had been talking about taking Stiles away. Peter might not be moving, but this could mean that he wasn’t completely gone after all. 

“You think I’m nuts,” Stiles said. 

“No. I believe you.” 

“You’re just saying that to humour me because you think I’m crazy. Maybe I am crazy. Maybe all the stress is making me hallucinate because I swear to god, I saw claws on your uncle’s hand. Maybe that inspector was the final straw and now I’ve completely flipped and I’m seeing things that aren’t there.” He continued to babble, terror coming off him in waves as he began to doubt his own eyes. Derek needed to do something quickly before things deteriorated further. He had to convince Stiles that he hadn’t been seeing things. 

“Stiles!” Derek snapped. “I believe you!” As he said those words, he brought his own hand up in front of Stiles’ face, nails transformed into claws. 

As Stiles yelled and leapt back from him, Derek realised that might not have been the best way to explain the existence of werewolves.


	9. Chapter 9

“Stiles,” Derek took a step forward. Stiles moved back again, tripped over his own feet, and landed with a heavy thump on his ass. When Derek moved to help him, Stiles scooted away until his back hit the wall. He kept staring up at Derek in fear. 

Derek raised his hands in what was meant to be a calming gesture but Stiles’ eyes were locked on his fingers, on the claws that still showed there. Derek quickly lowered his hands, forcing back the change until his hands looked human again, and backed away a few steps. He was between Stiles and the door and wasn’t sure if that was a good thing. It would keep Stiles from bolting, but it also might make Stiles feel more scared if he thought he was trapped. 

“Stiles, you’re safe,” Derek said. He could hear Stiles’ rapid breathing and the frantic racing of his heart. “I’m not going to hurt you.” 

“You’re...” Stiles managed between gasps of breath. 

“I’m still me. I’m still the same person I was five minutes ago. I’m not going to hurt you.” 

There were a million ways Derek could have handled this situation and Derek must have picked the worst possible one. Now Stiles was having what appeared to be a panic attack and it would only get worse if Derek tried to get near him again. Maybe he should just give Stiles a bit more space. But was it safe to leave someone alone during a panic attack? Wasn’t there something Derek should be doing to help? Something to do with counting and breathing? 

With every moment, Stiles seemed to be struggling, the terror filling the air of that room. Standing around wondering what to do certainly wasn’t helping and getting closer hadn’t helped, so that left Derek with one option. He backed slowly towards the door, giving Stiles space. 

“I’m going to go and put the kettle on,” Derek said. “I’ll make you some camomile tea. It’s supposed to be very calming. When you’re ready, you can join me in the kitchen and ask some of the million questions I’m sure you’ve got.” 

If Stiles continued freaking out and tried to run, there was a long stretch of woods before he was likely to bump into anyone to blurt this secret to. Besides, Derek could always track his scent and follow at a distance, just to make sure. He hoped Stiles wouldn’t run though and maybe treating Stiles like he wasn’t about to run would make him think that there was no need to. So Derek backed out of the room and did exactly as he’d said he would do. He filled the kettle and started it heating the water. He found a mug and a teabag, all the while listening to Stiles’ rapid breathing in the other room. 

By the time the water boiled, Stiles’ breathing had returned to normal. Derek poured the water over the teabag. He set the mug down on the table and then sat down, keeping the table between himself and the door. He tried to look as unthreatening as possible when Stiles came into the kitchen. He was wary, looking at Derek with as much suspicion as he had in his first few days here. He glanced at the mug. 

“How do I know that’s not something weird?” Stiles asked. 

“It’s still got the tag on the teabag.” Derek said. The teabags came on strings with little tags on the end so that they could be removed easily from the hot drink when the tea had seeped enough. The tag had the flavour of tea printed on it. Stiles crept cautiously to the table and inspected the tag. He sniffed at the contents of the mug. He didn’t drink. He didn’t sit. 

“You have claws,” Stiles said. 

“When I want to,” Derek answered. 

“Why do you have claws?” 

“I’m a werewolf.” 

He expected denial. He expected Stiles to protest that there was no such thing. Stiles just nodded. 

“And your uncle is a werewolf?” 

“Yes.” 

“Laura and Cora?” 

“Yes.” 

“Great. Everyone’s a werewolf. But I was with you on the full moon. That’s when you took me to the arcade. Is that why you took me to the arcade?” 

“In a way. Laura wanted to take Peter out under the full moon in case it triggered his healing or got a reaction out of him, and she told me to distract you so you didn’t ask questions.” 

“Oh,” said Stiles. He sounded disappointed. Derek wasn’t sure if this was a good sign or not. The fact that he hadn’t started running for the woods definitely was a good sign. 

Stiles continued, “So you don’t turn into rampaging monsters on the full moon?” 

And so Derek told him about werewolves, about how they could control the shift but how the full moon called to them. He showed Stiles his shifted form and explained how some werewolves could turn into actual wolves. He told Stiles how they had better hearing and sense of smell than humans. He told Stiles about their ability to heal but how they weren’t sure what this meant for Peter. 

“I heard you cry out,” Derek said, “right when Grennich was talking about maybe taking you somewhere else. I think maybe Peter listening. Maybe he reacted to Grennich like he was a threat to the pack and that’s why his claws shifted.” 

“Pack,” Stiles said. “Does this mean I’m part of the pack?” 

Derek hadn’t considered that. He really ought to have done. He thought about it now, about what it might mean. Stiles was living with them, eating with them, spending time with them as part of the household, but it wasn’t quite the same. Still, through all of this, Derek knew it would hurt if Stiles left and he knew he wanted to protect Stiles from the people who would hurt him. The pack bonds were there in potential, weak things right now but there and waiting for a chance to grow. 

“Not officially,” Derek said, “but, yes, in way, I think you are.” 

“Really confident in your answer there.” 

“I take it the sarcasm is a sign that you’re not scared anymore?” 

“You waved your claws right in my face! How did you think I would react?” 

“I’m sorry,” Derek said. He wasn’t sure if he’d said that earlier. He really should have done. “You were just freaking out that you’d imagined things and or that I’d think you were crazy and I wanted to show you that you were right.” 

“By flashing your razer-sharp claws at me? Yeah, that’s not going to freak someone out.” 

“I’m sorry,” Derek said again. 

“Do you bite people?” Stiles asked. “I mean, you guys are all a family is it like something in your genes which gets passed down or can you bite people and turn them into werewolves?” 

“Yes to the genes thing, sometimes to the biting. An alpha can turn someone with a bite.” 

“Alpha?” 

So Derek explained about pack hierarchies, what red eyes meant, bites, and even bite rejection. He talked about how the alpha power could be passed down or stolen through violence. 

“We don’t just run around attacking people at random,” Derek said. “The bite is a gift. It’s something the alpha gives if they want to make a person part of the pack and often there’s a reason someone wants the bite.” 

“A reason?” 

“Illness. We don’t get sick as werewolves. Someone with a chronic condition might see the bite as a cure. Other times, a person has a reason to want the strength that the bite gives them. Some just want the pack, if they’re lonely and don’t have strong family bonds as a human. An alpha should never turn a human unless that human actively consents to it knowing the risks involved.” 

“Meaning the whole bite rejection gruesome death thing?” 

“And other things,” Derek said. He was in this deep, he might as well cover everything, so he told Stiles about hunters, and about the fact that the fire had been set deliberately. He left out the part about how he’d let Kate get close enough to him to steal his clothes and conceal her scent, but he told Stiles how the hunters had killed most of his family and caused Peter’s condition. Stiles didn’t need to know Derek’s complicity in the murders. 

“Holy crap,” Stiles said. 

“Yeah.” 

“So they just... burned people alive?” 

“Some hunters are better than others, but they all consider us less than human. Most of them don’t even hesitate about slaughtering us.” 

“Wow... that...” 

“Yeah,” Derek said again. 

At some point during their long conversation, Stiles had sat down at the table across from Derek. The mug of tea was now stone cold between them, ignored as Stiles asked every question that came into his head. They were still there when Cora came home from school. She looked at them, taking in their serious expressions. 

“What happened? Is something wrong?” 

“Stiles knows the big secret,” Derek answered. 

Cora looked at Stiles in surprise and then back at Derek. 

“Did you ask Laura?” 

Derek cringed. He hadn’t asked Laura. He hadn’t asked his alpha’s permission before spilling their deepest, most critical secrets to someone they’d known only a few weeks. She was going to be mad at him. She probably wouldn’t mind that he’d told Stiles everything, but she would mind that he hadn’t so much as sent her a text telling her that he was about to do so. 

“Technically Peter’s the one who told me,” Stiles said. 

“What?! Peter told you something? And you didn’t start with that!”

“I went to trim his nails and he had claws.” 

Cora bolted from the kitchen and into Peter’s room. Somewhat calmer, Derek and Stiles followed. Peter lay on the bed. His hands were still exposed from earlier, with the perfectly human-looking nails. He hadn’t moved a muscle. He looked as he’d done on every other day. 

“Peter?” Cora took one of his hands in hers. “Peter, can you hear me? Can you do it again?” 

She alternated between looking at his face and his nails, but there was no sign he heard her. No response at all, but Derek was less confident now that this meant he was unaware. It could have been a coincidence that Peter had shown his claws while someone was in the house threatening to take Stiles away, but that seemed unlikely. Presumably then Peter could hear them, even if he couldn’t consciously control his body. 

“I want to try something,” Derek said. He went into the bathroom to grab some toilet paper and then returned to the bedside. Both Stiles and Cora looked at him in confusion. 

“Hi, Peter,” Derek said, “I want to try triggering your healing with pain. If you can hear me, if you’re aware, I’m sorry if this hurts but maybe it will help. If you want me to stop, just show your claws or move or do something. Anything.” 

Derek let his nails shift. He placed the tip of one claw against the soft skin of Peter’s arm, the one that wasn’t burned, and drew it down through the flesh. He didn’t cut deeply, just enough to slice through skin and let a trickle of blood flow out. Stiles grimaced and looked away. 

As soon as he was done, Derek used the toilet paper to mop up the blood before again could stain the bedclothes. The cut was already healing, the smooth skin showing as though nothing had happened. But nothing had happened with Peter either. No claws. No nothing. 

Stiles stared at the unblemished arm. 

“Maybe you should do that here,” he said. He’d walked round the other side of the bed to watch and now touched Peter’s other arm, on the patch of scarring that covered his shoulder and extended down to his elbow. Stiles had a point; it would be interesting to see how the damaged flesh responded. Derek rounded the bed. 

“OK, Peter, same again. If you give us some sort of sign, I’ll stop.” 

Derek waited, just in case, looking down at Peter’s claws and then up at his eyes. After a minute of absolutely no sign, Derek set his claw to Peter’s flesh again, this time dragging it through the scarred, red mess the fire had left behind. 

The blood flowed and Derek caught the stream of red on the toilet paper as the scent of it filled the room. He watched as the blood kept flowing, soaking through the white paper and turning it into a crimson mush. Cora ran to the bathroom to get more paper and they quickly put that into play. The blood soaked through it in an instant, dripping down around Derek’s fingers onto the sheets despite his efforts to stop it. 

“Sorry,” said Stiles. “I thought this might help. I didn’t mean...” 

“Not your fault,” Derek said. He was just about to send Cora for something more substantial to stem the bleeding with, when the edges of the cut finally started to knit together. He tossed the bloody mass of tissue into the nearby trashcan and watched as blood clotted into a scar that stood out against the burn scars around it, and then slowly, far too slowly, faded into ordinary skin. It was puckered and pulled out of smoothness by the surrounding scars when Derek lifted the arm for a better look, but it was healed. A line of ordinary skin slashed across the disfiguring scarring. 

“OK,” said Stiles, “that was cool. Slightly scary, but cool.” 

Derek stared at the line of healed skin. In theory, he could heal the rest of Peter’s scars this way. He could cut through the burn scars over and over until the smooth skin remained in their place, except this cut had taken far longer to heal than it should have done. Peter had deep scarring on his face and throat, cutting through that could make Peter bleed to death while they waited for him to heal. Derek didn’t know a great deal about anatomy but he knew that cutting near major arteries was a bad idea and they couldn’t be sure how well Peter would recover from those cuts. 

Besides, it didn’t help the major problem, which was the fact that Peter was catatonic. He hadn’t so much as flinched while his blood was spilling all over the bed. Healing Peter’s skin didn’t mean much if they couldn’t heal his mind. 

“I should get these sheets in the wash before they stain,” Stiles said. “I’m gonna need some salt.” 

“Salt?” Cora asked. 

“Yeah. Cold water and salt for fresh blood stains.” He sounded very confident about that which caused Cora to give him a confused and intrigued stare. Stiles noted the look. “It makes me sound like a serial killer to know that, doesn’t it?” 

“Only a little,” she said. 

Derek lifted Peter out of the bed and set him in the wheelchair, not bothering to hide his strength this time. He caught Stiles staring at him, watching the muscles on his arms. Derek worried that he might be scaring Stiles again, but then he caught another smell beneath the overwhelming scent of the blood. Arousal laced the air. 

Stiles quickly cleared his throat and turned to the bed, stripping the dirty sheets. He hurried from the bedroom without another word. Cora watched him go with a smirk. 

“Not a word,” Derek told her. Cora continued to smirk as she drew her fingers across her lips in a zipping motion.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no idea where the idea for the kitten thing came from. None whatsoever.

Cora had found a DVD of The Muppet’s Christmas Carol that Derek hadn’t realised they owned, and it was playing in the living room, Peter’s wheelchair positioned right in front of the screen so his blank eyes were staring straight at it. Beside him, Stiles was on the floor with a bucket of cold water, scrubbing at the blood splatters on Peter’s sheet, in between talking about how good an adaptation this movie was. Cora was on the couch with her homework, but Derek doubted much was being done. 

He wanted to be in there with them, he wanted this time as pack, but someone had to make dinner. It felt strange to perform an action so ordinary when the facts of life had shifted, but they had to eat. He kept the doors open to make it easier to hear what was going on in the other room. 

When the front door opened and Laura returned home, she sniffed the air and turned to Derek with concern on her face. 

“Blood?” she asked. “What happened?” 

Derek was nervous. Cora was right that he ought to have spoken to Laura earlier. 

“There’s good news,” Derek said, “bad news, and some news I’m not sure how you’ll take.” 

“What’s the good news?” Laura asked. 

“I’m reasonably confident Peter is aware of what’s going on around him.” 

Laura raised her eyebrows, the concern on her face replaced with cautious hope, “What happened?” 

“The bad news is that we had a random inspection from the debtor’s program and the guy was very rude about Stiles and suggested we send him back. That’s when Peter’s claws transformed.” 

“The inspector saw them?” Laura looked almost panicked. 

“No. But Stiles did. I told Stiles everything. I had to.” 

Laura glanced towards the living room, where the sound of singing puppets had temporarily silenced Stiles. 

“How did he take it?” 

Derek told her everything that had happened that afternoon, including the experiment with Peter’s scars and his logic for believing that Peter had to be aware. Laura listened carefully. She sat down at the table, eyes going often to the open door. 

“We have to...” She stopped. They had to do something, they both knew it, but neither of them knew what that something ought to be. Peter was aware, awake somewhere behind those blank eyes, but how were they supposed to reach him? In some ways, knowing that Peter was awake made things worse because they were all but helpless to fix this. 

Laura collected herself again and stood. She walked through to the living room. 

“Hey, Uncle Peter,” she said. “Enjoying the movie?” Of course there was no answer, but she continued as if he’d said something. “I would have thought you’d call it sacrilegious to stick puppets in a classic story.” 

Derek continued the dinner preparations. When the meal was ready, Laura pushed Peter’s wheelchair into the kitchen with them. He was as still as ever, his eyes as blank, and all Derek could think about were all those evenings when Peter had been left alone in his bedroom while the rest of them were a pack. He thought about all those hours, before Stiles started reading to him and talking to him, when all Peter had was silence. Derek ached a little inside from the guilt of it. 

“So Amanda’s up to her tricks again,” Laura said, turning her head as she addressed them all, eyes falling on Peter’s face even though his eyes were still staring blankly. 

“The lunch thief?” Cora asked. 

“Yeah. It wasn’t people’s lunches this time but one of the developers brought in some cookies for his birthday and Amanda grabbed a huge handful. Some people didn’t get any and she took at least six or seven. Greedy.” 

“Maybe she’s just hungry,” Stiles said. All the eyes, except Peter’s, were suddenly on him. “I don’t know. I mean, Jackson stole people’s food because he was a jerk so she could be the same, but maybe she’s stealing food because she doesn’t have enough at home.” 

Laura didn’t answer. She stared down at her plate. As a pack, they weren’t rich. Their money had gone on Peter’s medical bills and finding a place to live that had enough space for them to shift and run, but they’d never starved. Even when they had to be careful and calculate their spending, they’d always had enough to eat. Derek looked across at Stiles, who calculated every cent against the weight of his debt, and wondered how different the world must look to him. 

“She’s in a salaried position,” Laura said. She sounded like she was pleading. 

“But what’s her home life like?” Stiles asked. 

Laura was forced to concede that she didn’t know. It was possible that Amanda was as greedy and selfish as Laura had believed her to be since before she knew the identity of the lunch thief, but it was also possible that her thefts had been acts of desperation. Maybe Amanda had her own debts looming over her, the spectre of Stiles’ position should she fail to make a single payment. 

“I suppose I should talk to her,” Laura said. “Maybe I could bring in a spare sandwich.” 

“Who knows, maybe she is just a jerk,” Stiles said. He sounded hopeful and Derek understood why; if Amanda was a jerk, then none of them would have to feel guilty about the cupcake trap. 

Laura changed the subject by asking Cora about her day at school. They talked about inconsequential things, ignoring the wheelchair-bound elephant in the room. Derek wondered if this was better or worse for Peter, to be ignored completely or to be brought so close to the pack but be unable to take part. 

At the end of the meal, it was Laura who took Peter back to his room and lifted him into the bed. Derek cleaned up the dishes, listening to Laura make promises that she would do everything in her power to make things right. 

***

The day after Peter showed his claws, there was a subtle difference in the house. Stiles had found a radio and set it up in Peter’s room on a station that seemed nonstop news and political discussions. 

“I figured you might want to hear a bit about what’s going on in the world,” Stiles said. “It’s basically the same as ever: politicians are untrustworthy, the economy is in the toilet, and we’re still blowing people up in other countries and ignoring all the gun crime in this one.” 

He continued through Peter’s morning routine, alternating his voice with the ones from the radio. Upstairs in his room, Derek stared at the screen in front of him, not seeing the words he was supposed to be typing. Eventually, he unplugged his laptop and carried it downstairs. He grabbed a chair from the kitchen and positioned himself on the tiny patch of empty floor just inside the door of Peter’s room. 

“I thought I might work in here for a bit,” Derek said. 

“Is this going to be distracting?” Stiles asked. He gestured towards the radio. 

“Probably but leave it on.” 

He didn't know what to say to Peter, he couldn't just carry on a one-sided conversation the way Stiles could, but he wanted to do something. He hoped that by being here, he could give some form of comfort. Maybe Peter would be able to pick up his scent or hear his heartbeat and know that pack was close. It was such a tiny thing, but it was all Derek could offer. 

Derek tried to get on with his work, distracted more by Stiles’ ongoing commentary than the radio. He would probably need to rewrite every word he’d just written but still he didn’t want to leave. Peter was pack. Somehow the events of yesterday had made that feel real again. 

When Stiles finished Peter’s exercises, Derek lifted Peter out into his wheelchair. It felt easier to include Peter when he was sitting up than when he was lying in his bed. By then, the battery on Derek’s laptop was dying so he went up to his room, but he left his window open so he could hear Stiles’ voice as Stiles wheeled Peter out onto the porch to begin reading from the science book he’d bought on their excursion. Derek expected to quickly zone out and get on with his work, since science had never been his thing, but he found the writing more interesting than he’d expected and Stiles’ voice was lively and engaging. After a short while, he realised he wasn’t going to get any work done so he went outside and sat beside Stiles on the porch seat, listening to Stiles’ voice and watching his motionless uncle. 

There were still no signs of awareness. The wheelchair was positioned to face Stiles, but Peter’s eyes remained motionless, staring vacantly straight ahead in roughly the direction of Stiles’ chest. There wasn’t so much as a twitch from Peter, no sign of the claws that had caused such joy and chaos in their house. Watching Peter now, Derek couldn’t help wondering if he’d been wrong. Maybe the claws had been a fluke, nothing at all to do with the visitor in the house. Maybe all Derek’s hopes had been yet more wishful thinking. 

They took Peter into the kitchen with them when they ate lunch and then Stiles took him through to the living room to watch a show. They didn’t have much of a selection of DVDs and they didn’t want the expense of signing up to a subscription service, so Stiles complained through the meagre pickings before putting in an old action film. 

“Peter hates those sort of films,” Derek said. “He likes weird foreign films that you have to watch ten times and analyse with a microscope before they start making sense.” 

“Have you got any of those?” Stiles asked. 

Derek considered the question and then was forced to admit that they didn’t. Peter’s films had been destroyed like everything else in the fire and it hadn’t exactly been a priority to restock with films only he enjoyed, especially since he’d been in full time care until recently. So Stiles started up the action film and kept up a running commentary about the exploits of Action Dude, Token Black Guy, and a character Stiles dubbed Perky Breasts because those seemed to be her only contribution to the plot. Stiles complained about the lack of realism from the first minute. 

“Why don’t you put something else in if you don’t like it?” Derek suggested. 

“What? I’m having fun.” 

“You’ve criticised everything about the film from the beginning.” 

“Therein lies the fun.” On the screen, Action Dude smashed through a window and fell about three storeys. “Oh please! Like you’d get up and walk away from that! Speaking as someone who’s been to hospital six times for broken bones, that’s not physically possible.” 

“Six times?” Derek asked, alarmed. 

Stiles counted on his fingers, “Fell out a tree, fell off the roof, fell out a different tree, tried to prove it was possible to walk across the top of the monkey bars, discovered that hockey was not the sport for me, and survived an attempted assassination by a kitten.” 

Derek was certain he’d misheard that last part. As good as his hearing was, there had been a lot of explosions happening on the screen while Stiles was speaking. 

“A kitten tried to assassinate you?” 

“It deliberately and maliciously leapt at my feet while I was going down the stairs and tripped me,” Stiles said. He uttered this with such seriousness that it made Derek want to laugh all the more. 

But he also thought about the way cats behaved around him, reacting to his scent with an instinctive fear. They had a tendency to hiss and spit as soon as he got close. It shouldn’t matter, but this little connection sparked warmth somewhere inside Derek. 

“Cats and I have never gotten along,” Derek said. 

“Oh, cats in general, I don’t mind,” Stiles said. “This little thing was a spawn of evil. It was a rescue cat Scott tried to rehabilitate. He said it was bad tempered because it had been mistreated but I maintain that it ate the souls of its previous owners.” 

Derek’s good humour stayed mostly because he was pretty confident that there was no such thing as housecats that ate the souls of their owners. 

“There’s one small problem with your story,” he said. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Stiles said. “I know… I’m blaming a helpless kitten when I was being clumsy.” 

“No. You’re not a celebrity or politician. Your death at the hands of the monster kitty would have been a straight-forward homicide, not an assassination.” 

There was a sharp exhalation of breath, hardly audible over noise of the movie, but it was enough for both Derek and Stiles to turn towards the wheelchair. Peter hadn’t moved an inch, but that huff of air was so different from his normal, steady breathing that it still drew their attention. 

“Was that a laugh?” Stiles asked. “Peter, are you laughing at me?” 

There was no sign from the wheelchair. Peter’s eyes stared blankly in front of him. His body sat where Derek had positioned him. His breathing was its usual, even rhythm. But they hadn’t imagined that change earlier. A huff of amusement at their conversation? Or a coincidental noise? 

“Peter?” Derek asked. Nothing. 

Something was definitely happening with Peter, some change, but it was so faint. These moments of reaction were so small that they were gone almost before they could be seen. It was hard to see what they meant or if there was some common factor they could use to bring Peter out further. 

He let himself believe that Peter had laughed earlier, that he’d been listening to their conversation and amused by it. He let himself hope that this was real.


	11. Chapter 11

Laura decided that they needed to take Peter back to Beacon Hills. She thought being in their old territory might help him. Seeing where they’d lived before might trigger a reaction in him. If nothing else, it would give him a change of scenery. If he really was aware behind those blank eyes, variety had to be a good thing for him. She announced her decision and there was agreement from the others, though it was obvious that Stiles was surprised when he realised she meant for him to go with them. 

“You’re the one who’s been there every time Peter’s reacted so far,” Laura pointed out. 

“Yeah,” said Stiles, “but that doesn’t mean much. I’m just around him more than anyone else.” 

What was meant as a shrugging off of praise hit Derek like a blow. Derek had been in the same house as Peter as much as Stiles and for a longer time, but he hadn’t spent nearly as much time in his uncle’s presence as Stiles had. Derek had been there for one sign of Peter’s awareness. How many others had he missed because he had been up in his room completely ignoring his pack member? 

Going in a single car would be painfully crowded with the five of them plus Peter’s chair along with enough belongings for an overnight stay. It would be more comfortable for them all to take two cars. Laura announced that she would take Peter in her car along with Stiles. She wanted to ask Stiles about everything he’d witnessed from Peter, just in case she’d missed anything the first time she’d been told. That left Derek to take Cora in his car. 

Cora brought some text books with her and announced that she had a ton of reading to get done for school, which meant the journey passed in almost total silence for Derek. He didn’t mind the quiet, his sister studying her books while he stared out the windshield at the passing miles, but as the minutes slipped by, he was once again left thinking about Peter. How long had Peter been aware for? Was this some new thing triggered recently by his enhanced healing? Or had he been aware all along and they just hadn’t been paying close enough attention? 

That thought filled him with guilt and fear. Six years had passed since the fire. When had been the last time they’d visited Peter in the care facility? Five years ago? They’d left him alone and got on with their lives. If Peter had been awake all that time, how much attention would the nurses and others have given him? Derek tried to imagine the loneliness of being ignored for so long. His mind couldn’t really grasp how awful that would be. 

He hoped desperately that Stiles had triggered Peter’s awakening somehow and he wished he could just ask Peter. It was selfish, he knew, but he wanted reassurance that he hadn’t committed this crime against his pack. Another crime. 

They arrived in Beacon Hills mid-morning, Derek following Laura’s car into woods that had once been theirs. The drive didn’t seem at all familiar. The trees and plants of the nature preserve had grown and shifted over the years since they’d gone away. Now it felt like they were intruding into someone else’s territory as he drove up the even road towards the ruin of their former home. 

The house loomed out of the woods like something out of a horror story, a burned-out wreck, blackened by fire and time. The horror burned into him, all the more horrific because this was familiar. The shape of the remaining walls, the layout of the windows, all of it hit home with a pain that was almost physical. Derek had to stop the car and put it in park so that he could just breathe through the onslaught of memories, the sick sensation of guilt that surged through him. 

In a heartbeat, it all it him. He remembered Kate’s lips on his ear, her whispers of love, the confusion when he found his clothes missing, and Laura’s frantic, tearful phone call. Derek clutched at the steering wheel with shaking hands, trying to hold himself in the present, to push back the waves of memory. 

“Are you OK?” Cora asked. 

“I’m fine,” Derek said. She didn’t call him on the lie. 

He breathed deeply, inhaling his sister’s scent. Pack. Family. Home. 

He closed his eyes and gathered himself, ignoring Cora’s concerned expression, then he climbed from the car. Laura was already lifting Peter out of the other car and setting him in the wheelchair. Peter was in actual clothes for once instead of a hospital gown, in honour of the occasion. Derek looked around at the trees. That was preferable to looking at the house, but the smell of ash and ruin still clung to the air. The woods were subtly different, but the trees were still where they’d stood before. He could almost make himself believe that he’d just been away on a short trip and that he could turn around and see the house behind him, whole and safe, with his family waiting for him inside. 

“Hey, man,” Stiles appeared at Derek’s said, “you OK?” 

“A lot of memories here,” Derek said. It was as close to an explanation as he was willing to give. Stiles placed a hand on his arm. It was supposed to be comfort, but all Derek could think about was the way Kate had touched him. He shrugged the hand away and turned back to Peter. He needed to do something to distract himself from his own thoughts. 

“What can I do to help?” he asked Laura. 

“Watch him,” she answered. Then she crouched so her face was in Peter’s eye level and spoke to him, “Peter, please see me. Please respond if you can. We’re trying to help you. We want to help you come back to yourself.” 

She continued on for some time, offering reassurances and entreating him to move or speak or show some other sign. Derek watched Peter, studying his face, listening to his heartbeat, waiting for some movement. Nothing. As Laura kept talking, Derek couldn’t help wondering if this whole trip had been for nothing. 

“Let’s try something else,” Laura said at last. She shifted, shrugging off her clothes as she changed into her beta form. Stiles gave a strangled squeak and turned around, putting his hand over his eyes at the sudden exposure of skin. Then Laura kept shifting, her body growing, bones cracking as they reshaped themselves, fur sprouting from every part of her. After a minute, she stood there, in a form that looked more animal than human. Stiles risked looking back but, other than the slight increased speed of his heart, he showed no sign of fear. 

Laura stood in front of Peter and roared. It was a sound that shook the ground like and earthquake. It made the trees wave and the ruined house groan. It filled the air with a solid barrage of noise. The sound of it reached down inside Derek and called to pack. Even though it wasn’t aimed at him, Derek felt the call with every fibre of his being, his body wanting to react to his alpha’s call, to shift. He found his claws sprouting in answer. The desire to change flooded him like the full moon, but he held himself in control, watching Peter for any sign of response. 

“Holy crap, that was awesome,” Stiles muttered as the echoes of the roar started to fade. 

Derek glanced away from Peter long enough to catch the excited grin on Stiles’ face, but when he looked back, he saw reason for his own excitement. Peter’s nails had once more transformed into claws. 

Peter had showed no other sign of the shift and he hadn’t so much as twitched a muscle, but some part of him had responded to his alpha’s call. 

“That didn’t happen on the full moon,” Cora said. Laura took hold of Peter’s hand in her huge, alpha’s claw. If this hadn’t worked last time but did now, maybe Derek wasn’t unfounded in his hope that his uncle’s awareness was a recent development. 

“Peter,” Derek said. “Are you in there?” 

Laura shifted back into her beta form; the alpha form wasn’t the easiest for speaking. Stiles yelped again as the fur vanished into naked skin. 

“Try what you did before,” Laura said. “Cut the scar.” 

Derek drew a claw down the rough scar tissue and fresh blood welled up. Laura still held onto Peter’s clawed hand, the black lines on their skin showing that she was drawing out the pain even as Derek caused it. 

“We want you to heal,” Laura told Peter. “Maybe pain when you’re partially shifted will trigger your healing.” 

She didn’t sound particularly confident. Derek watched the blood flow slow to a trickle and the newly healed skin form over the injury. At least the smell of blood overwhelmed the ash scent in the air. Derek cut another line in the scar and Laura continued with the drawing out of pain. Maybe the connection to his alpha would help him. Derek just wished for some more concrete sign of consciousness. He was beginning to wonder if the claws were a subconscious reaction that didn’t actually mean much. He seemed to be flipping between hope and disappointment every few minutes. 

“Maybe you should try up near his head,” Stiles said. He tapped his forehead. “That’s where the problem is.” 

Derek wasn’t sure this would do anything. The real injury lay inside Peter’s skull, not on the skin outside it, but it was worth a try. He sliced his claw across the scarred skin on the side of Peter’s forehead. Once again, the blood dripped down, sticky and red, over his hand. Once again, the wound took time to heal while Laura drew out Peter’s pain. 

Once that wound was closed, they cleaned up the blood with cloths Laura had brought for just this purpose and wiped the newly healed lines of pink skin with wet wipes. Peter’s claws had receded by now, so Laura went back to the speaking and cajoling, encouraging Peter to move or speak or something. Once again, silence answered them. 

With a sigh, Laura declared it lunchtime and broke out the packed sandwiches. 

“Come on, Peter,” Stiles said. “We’re getting bored here. Break out the fangs. Get up and do a tap dance. At this point, I’d take a head shake.” 

Again, nothing. Laura looked thoroughly miserable. Derek guessed that some part of her had hoped that they’d get here and somehow, magically, Peter would be alright again. 

After lunch, they took a walk through the woods around the old house, with Stiles talking almost non-stop. It was slow going, lifting Peter’s wheelchair over uneven terrain more often than they could wheel it, but soon the smell of the ruined house was replaced by the scent of the woods. The familiarity set in then, the scent reaching down into Derek and telling him that he was home. He wondered if it was having the same effect on Peter. 

Stiles talked about growing up in Beacon Hills, about trespassing in these woods with Scott, and an occasion where Scott had nearly lost his asthma inhaler out here. After a little while, Laura joined in with stories about pack night under the full moon, about how they’d shifted and run together under the trees. She talked about family, about their parents, their cousins, the aunts and uncles, and everyone they’d lost in the fire. 

“Does the pain ever go away?” Stiles asked, when Laura’s words petered out. 

“Not so far,” she answered. 

They trudged on, lifting Peter up and over a rotten log. 

“I miss my dad,” Stiles said after a bit. “And my mom.” 

“What happened to your mom?” Laura asked. 

“Illness. It was a form of dementia. Bits of her brain started shutting down. It was a slow decline. She started having bad dreams and forgetting stuff, but then it became hallucinations, paranoid delusions, and at times she forgot who we were.” Stiles swallowed. “At the end, she didn’t even feel like my mom anymore.” 

“I’m sorry,” Laura said. 

Stiles shrugged. Derek wondered about that slow decline and how much that must have cost. He wondered if Stiles’ comments about medical bills were about more than just his dad. This wasn’t the time to ask questions like that though. 

They reached a clearing and they set Peter down in the middle of it for Laura to try again to speak to him. She tried again with the roar and, like last time, Peter’s claws showed themselves without any other sign of his awareness. They tried for about another half hour and then made their way slowly back to the house. 

When they set Peter’s wheelchair back beside the cars, Laura turned to the others. 

“Anyone got any ideas?” she asked. 

Stiles went up to the wheelchair and stood in front of it. Suddenly, he shot a hand forward towards Peter’s face. 

Peter blinked. 

Stiles tried again. Again, Peter blinked at the hand shot towards his eyes. 

“It’s not quite a flinch response,” Stiles said, “but it’s kind of a response.” 

He held a hand in front of Peter’s face and moved it back and forth, trying to get Peter to track his eye movement. That experiment was less successful; Peter continued staring blankly in front of him. 

“There is something else I can try,” Laura said. “I hoped I wouldn’t have to because it’s dangerous. There’s a technique that Mom mentioned once, something alphas can do.” She reached up and rubbed at the back of her neck. “She said we could use our claws to tap into another werewolf’s nerves and see glimpses of their memories. I could maybe use this and get a glimpse of Peter, at least find out whether or not he his conscious in there.” 

“So why didn’t you suggest this earlier?” Stiles asked. 

“It’s dangerous,” Laura answered. “If I get it wrong, I could damage the nerves. I could paralyse him. Or kill him.” 

“Paralysis doesn’t strike me as much of an issue right now,” Stiles pointed out. 

“True. But what if he is healing and would get better soon and I do something that stops him healing?” 

Derek could hear the fear in her voice. She was afraid of making things worse. 

“We have to try something,” he said. 

Laura nodded. “There’s someone I want to talk to first, someone who might be able to offer advice. He used to offer advice to Mom. If I’m going to risk this, I want to get all the help I can.” 

“OK,” said Derek. “Where is this guy?” 

“I’ll talk to him myself. You guys can stay here and keep trying to get through to Peter.” 

“Shouldn’t we also think about trying to find a hotel?” Cora asked. “We don’t want to be driving around later trying to find somewhere to stay?” 

Laura agreed and it was decided that Cora would go with her into town. Cora would sort out rooms for them to stay the night while Laura spoke to the advisor. Derek and Stiles were to stay with Peter, trying to get through to him, and then drive to Cora once she’d found them a hotel. As Cora put it, there was no point all of them wandering around town trying to find somewhere with vacant rooms. 

As the car drove off, Stiles turned to Peter, “I get the feeling your niece is still hoping for a miracle. Do yourself a favour and wake up before she has to do this scary paralysis procedure.” No response. “Come on, Peter, you could at least laugh at me or roll your eyes or something. I’m sure you don’t want anyone else sticking claws into you. No one’s expecting you to run a marathon right away.” 

Stiles wheeled the chair over towards the house and then sat down on the porch steps, still facing Peter. 

“Must have been quite a house when it was whole,” Stiles said. 

“It was,” Derek answered. “The whole pack lived here so we needed a lot of space.” 

He forced himself to look up at the ruin, at the scorched and broken wood. He’d been ignoring this for so long, trying not to think about what he’d done, but he couldn’t hide from his guilt forever. 

“You OK?” Stiles asked. Derek shrugged. 

He walked up the porch steps, the wood creaking ominously beneath his feet. He pushed open the door and looked into the shadowy ruin. The ash scent was worse. Derek could close his eyes and see the house as it had been, only to open them and see the wreckage that remained. The main stairs still stood, though Derek wasn’t sure he would trust them to bear his weight. There were scraps of furniture in the rooms to either side of the front hall. An age-spotted mirror glinted in faint light. 

“Hey,” Stiles said softly, following Derek into the house. “Are you sure it’s safe to be in here?” 

“Probably not,” Derek answered. It would serve him right if the whole building collapsed on top of him, smothering him in charred wood the way his family had been smothered in smoke. But Stiles didn’t deserve that. “You should wait outside.” 

“How about we both go back outside?” 

Derek looked around. He wasn’t sure what he was looking for. Death? An easy way out? That would just hurt Laura further. The thought of what it would do to his sisters was the only reason he’d stayed alive some days but it was still a strong reason to live. He wasn’t going to let this house kill him and he wasn’t going to find an answer to his guilt in the shadows. He breathed in, taking in again the smoky smell of death, and then nodded. 

Stiles took hold of Derek’s hand and tugged him gently towards the door. Derek let himself be led. He stepped out of the burned out shell of a house into the sunlight, and stopped short at the sight of Peter standing at the bottom of the porch steps.


	12. Chapter 12

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a rather short chapter, but it was just too evil for me to resist. I feel like I might need a bodyguard after posting this chapter. 
> 
> Enjoy. :)

“Peter?” Derek said, hardly daring to believe the evidence of his own eyes. Peter was standing there. His eyes looked as blank as ever, staring at nothing. His face was angled away from them. He just stood there, motionless. Derek would have believed him as catatonic as ever except that Peter had never stood on his own since the fire, not once in six years. 

“Oh my god,” Stiles breathed out, obviously as shocked by this change as Derek. A thrill of excitement rushed through Derek, pushing aside the bewilderment. After all this time, after all the times he hadn’t dared hope for any improvement, this was incredible. 

Derek didn’t bother with a careful descent of the creaking porch steps, he just leapt straight to the ground, landing at Peter’s side. He put a hand on Peter’s arm. Peter didn’t react to the touch in any way. His skin felt slightly chill beneath Derek’s fingers. 

“Peter?” Derek said again, hoping for some further reaction. Peter had stood on his own, he’d moved his body. It wasn’t crazy to wish for some other sign of conscious action. Derek stepped directly into Peter’s line of sight. He looked his uncle up and down, seeing the claws on Peter’s fingers. Peter’s face remained human, but the first indications of a shift were there. What had triggered this? Was it a delayed reaction from Laura’s efforts earlier? Or had something else triggered a response? Why didn’t this happen earlier when Laura had been here? 

It was unnerving that Peter still seemed unaware of his surroundings, even as he was standing a few feet away from his chair. He must have stood and walked on his own, only a few steps but that was still a massive achievement, something Derek would hardly have believed possible a few weeks ago. So why was his face as blank as ever? Derek tried shifting position, testing to see if Peter’s eyes followed him, but they never so much as twitched. Peter blinked slowly but didn’t seem to see. This change which had seemed so monumental a few seconds ago started to feel small. If Peter was able to stand and walk, why wasn’t he looking at Derek? 

“Are you in there, Peter? It’s me. It’s Derek. Your nephew.” 

Claws slashed across Derek’s stomach. 

It took a second for pain to make it through the shock. Derek staggered backwards, looking down at the blood that flowed down from the deep cuts in his abdomen. Derek just stared at the pour of red that soaked through his shirt and dripped onto the ground, too surprised to do anything else. 

“Derek!” Stiles yelled, rushing to his side. 

“Stay back,” Derek yelled. He raised an arm to hold Stiles back, not wanting Stiles anywhere near Peter until he figured out what was going on with him. Derek could heal. He was already healing. This same wounds on Stiles could be fatal. 

As Derek’s attention snapped towards Stiles, Peter moved again. Claws raked hot lines down Derek’s chest. Derek staggered and gasped at the pain. Claws slashed through Derek’s flesh, scraping against his ribs. Pain, hot and sharp, rushed through Derek’s torso and Derek snarled despite himself. 

“Peter!” Stiles yelled. “Peter, we’re on your side.” 

Derek grabbed Peter’s wrists before the man could lash out again. He held on tightly, not wanting to feel those claws in his flesh any more than he already had, but trying to avoid hurting his uncle despite it all. Was this Peter’s revenge for their attempts to trigger his healing with pain? Derek wasn’t sure if he should be fighting or apologising or pleading. Peter continued staring blankly, as though his body was reacting on its own, without any consciousness driving it. He wasn’t even meeting Derek’s eyes. If this had been a stranger sticking claws in him, Derek wouldn’t have hesitated to stick his own claws right back, but what was he supposed to do when he was attacked by his uncle? An uncle who didn’t seem even slightly with it. 

“Peter,” Derek said again. “Peter, we’re pack.” 

Peter snarled. Fangs burst from his mouth and he leaned forward into Derek. Agony soured in Derek’s neck and throat. Stiles screamed. Hot blood spurted down Derek’s skin like a waterfall. His breath tasted of pain. Derek was too surprised to even fight back and all he could think was that he deserved this. This death at the teeth of his uncle was the universe finally balancing the scales for his complicity in the destruction of his entire family. 

He saw the movement out of the corner of his eye and then the length of wood exploded into rotten shards against Peter’s head. 

The fangs withdrew. Blood gushed out again even faster and Derek collapsed, unable to hold up his own weight as weakness rushed through him. He wanted to scream out a warning, but his breath gurgled in his throat. His lungs burned with fresh agony as he tried to draw a breath and found it wet with blood. The spasms of coughing shook his chest, tormenting the existing wounds, as he tried to draw air inside. 

All he could do was watch, prone on the ground and fighting for every breath, as Stiles backed away from Peter, dropping the end of the stick he’d used as a makeshift weapon. Stiles held up his hands in a pleading gesture. 

“Peter, stop,” Stiles begged. “We’re on your side. We’re trying to help. You really don’t need to kill anyone here. We want to help you get better. Peter, please.” 

Peter wasn’t listening. He didn’t seem to have even heard. He stalked towards Stiles and Derek cursed the exercises they’d done daily to make sure Peter’s limbs didn’t atrophy. Derek wanted to scream at Stiles to run. In his current state, Peter might not be able to give chase. Stiles might stand a chance of getting away. But Derek could barely draw breath, let alone shout, and Stiles kept backing away slowly, eyes locked on Peter’s face. Stiles stumbled over a rock, righted himself, and then found himself backed into a tree, Peter right in front of him. 

Derek tried to say something, but he tasted blood. Each breath nearly choked him against the wetness in his mouth. He tried to push himself up, but his arms shook and refused to hold his weight. The wounds in his stomach were already healing but it wasn’t enough. It was all too slow. 

“Peter, you don’t want to do this,” Stiles said. “I’m your friend. I’ve read you stories. Seriously, death by werewolf is not how I saw my life ending. Please don’t do this.” 

Peter put his hands on Stiles’ shoulders, pressing him against the tree, pinning him in place. He leaned in closer and Derek was certain for one terrifying moment that Peter was going to rip Stiles’ throat out like he’d been about to do with Derek. 

“Peter?” Stiles pleaded, voice shaking. 

Then Peter breathed in deeply. He pressed his nose into the side of Stiles’ neck and breathed in his scent. Derek could smell Stiles’ terror even from here, even over the smell of his own spilled blood. 

“Peter, please don’t,” Stiles said. 

Peter moved back from the tree, one hand still clinging to Stiles’ shoulder, towing him along after him. With each moment, Peter was moving faster, more definitely. 

“OK,” Stiles said, “this is progress, I guess, but could you let go of me so I could stop Derek’s bleeding? He looks like he’s in really bad shape and you don’t want to kill your nephew so how about you let me help him?” 

Derek could see Peter’s face now. The complete emptiness was fading in and out, replaced by an expression of fury. Peter snarled a low growl of anger. 

“Peter, come on, let’s talk this through like reasonable people. I’m sure you’re a reasonable person beneath all that growling, right?” 

Peter towed Stiles towards the Camaro. His eyes were definitely focusing on, looking at the car. He stopped, frozen for a moment, like someone had put him on pause, and then he reached out and flung the passenger door open. He shoved Stiles into the seat. Derek tried to remember what he’d done with the keys. Had he taken them out when he’d left the car? Or were they still in the ignition? 

“Are we going for a drive?” Stiles said. “I’m OK with that, but maybe we should patch up Derek since this is his car and he really should be the one to drive it.” 

Stiles’ eyes kept flicking over towards Derek. Derek tried to let him know with his expression that he would be fine. The wounds were already knitting close, the deep teeth marks in his neck sealing. The flow of blood was already much less than it had been, but he’d lost so much already that he wanted to just close his eyes and go to sleep. Even with supernatural healing, he couldn’t lose blood indefinitely and any movement would just make his heart beat faster and push more of his dwindling blood supply out through the holes. The best thing to do was to just lie here and let the wounds heal. But that would mean just ignoring whatever Peter had planned. Derek had a horrible feeling the keys were still in the Camaro. 

Peter kept shoving, pushing Stiles further into the car. Derek rolled over onto his front and put his hands beneath him, pushing up on shaking arms. The movement caused a wetness in his throat again and Derek coughed. Blood splattered the dirt beneath him as he choked in it. More coughs wracked his body, filling his torso with fresh pain. His attempts to stand were betrayed by his own, treacherous body but then the breaths came more easily, with no more choking blood. 

He’d just about managed to push himself onto his knees and was about to make an attempt at standing, when he heard the first word Peter had uttered in six years. 

“Drive.” It was a growl, more animal than human, and Derek looked over towards the Camaro. Stiles was in the driver’s seat, looking as scared as ever. Stiles met Derek’s eyes for an instant and then, at a snarl from Peter, who was sitting in the passenger seat, he turned on the car’s engine. Derek could only watch as the Camaro pulled away. 

Derek collapsed down onto the ground again, lying in a puddle of his spilled blood. He couldn’t chase a car in this condition. His throat and chest throbbed with pain and his whole body trembled with weakness from the blood loss. He could lie here for a few minutes and heal, then he could call Laura and they could figure out what the hell they were supposed to do now. 

How the hell had everything gone so wrong in just a few minutes? What the hell was going on with Peter? 

He hadn’t seemed like Peter. He hadn’t seemed like a person at all. There had certainly been no recognition in his face. Were all the signs they’d taken as awareness just his animal side, while his human side was still as dormant as ever? 

All this time trying to reach Peter, and this was the result? It was like some sick joke at his expense. And poor Stiles. What might Peter be doing to Stiles in this condition? 

Derek drew a breath that didn’t taste of blood and experimented with talking. He choked out a croaking, “Stiles,” and decided that was good enough to try and make a phone call. The damage to his throat was healed far enough that he could at least call for help. 

He fumbled in his pocket for his phone, managing to unlock it with trembling fingers and pull up Laura’s number from the contacts list. He listened to the ringing noise, wondering what he’d do if she didn’t answer. What if she was talking to the advisor person and she decided to let it go to voicemail? 

The ringing ended and Laura’s voice, a mixture of annoyance and hopefulness, asked, “Derek?” 

“Help,” Derek said, the word sounding rough but emerging from his throat unhindered by choking blood. “Peter.” 

“Derek? What is it? Did something happen to Peter?” 

“Peter happened. Attacked us. Stiles.” 

“What the hell? Is Stiles OK?” 

Derek dragged in another breath. “Took him. Peter took Stiles.”


	13. Chapter 13

Derek was healed when Laura’s car came racing up the dirt road. He still felt weak and was ravenous with hunger, but the holes Peter had torn in him were closed. Laura leapt out of the car and hurried to him, eyes taking in the blood that soaked his clothes, the dark puddles on the earth. She looked at the abandoned wheelchair, at the blood spills, then back at him. 

“What the hell happened?” she demanded. 

Derek told her: Peter had been standing, he’d attacked Derek, then he’d taken Stiles in Derek’s car. 

“Why the hell would he attack you?” Cora asked, a step behind Laura. 

“I’m not sure he was really conscious,” Derek said. “We have to find Stiles. He’s not safe with Peter.” 

He couldn’t stop seeing the look of terror on Stiles’ face. 

Laura helped Derek into the car and handed him the last of the sandwiches, left over from lunch. Derek ate them in a few mouthfuls, and could happily have eaten five times as many. His body needed much more than this to heal properly but they couldn’t exactly stop for a three course meal. 

“Where would he have taken Stiles?” Cora asked. Derek didn’t have an answer. 

“I don’t think Peter recognised me,” Derek said. “I don’t know what he’s thinking. If he’s thinking.” 

“Should we call the police?” Cora asked. “Get them to look for the car?” 

Laura shook her head, “The police wouldn’t know how to deal with Peter and they won’t let us handle it.” 

Derek wished they’d brought Stiles a phone, but there’d never been any need before now. Neither Peter nor Stiles had anything on them that they could use to contact them. 

Laura reached the end of the narrow road into the preserve. It met a much larger road that skirted the woods. Now she was faced with an impossibly difficult question: left or right. 

“If Peter’s aiming somewhere specific,” Laura said, “it’s probably somewhere in Beacon Hills. If he’s driving to get away for some reason, he could be heading anywhere. We have to assume it’s the former.” 

There was no evidence either way, but they had to assume Peter was still in Beacon Hills because they couldn’t search the entire country. Laura started moving again, driving towards Beacon Hills, glancing towards Derek again. 

“You can’t go through town looking like that,” she added. Derek looked down at himself. His shirt was torn and completely covered with drying blood. Laura was right; he’d cause a panic within five minutes. 

“We have to split up,” she said, “and hunt by scent. Derek, I’ll drop you off at the outskirts. Do a circuit of the town and try to stay out of sight. Cora and I will start in the centre and work our way outwards. The first person to pick up a scent of either Stiles or Peter, text the other two and we’ll converge on that point.” 

That meant Derek still might have to run through town covered in blood, but it would minimise the issue of terrified humans. They approached the outer suburbs and Laura pulled over. She gave Derek one last look. 

“You sure you’re up for it?” she asked. 

“Yes,” Derek snarled, because he had to be. Stiles was in danger. He wasn’t going to let Peter hurt Stiles, especially since Derek had been in the perfect position to stop Peter. Back at the house, he could have fought back. He could have stopped Peter then and there if he hadn’t been so concerned about hurting the other werewolf. He should have taken Peter down and trusted in Peter’s healing ability, rather than risk danger to Stiles. 

Derek leapt out of the car and started running, skirting garden fences and the treeline of the woods. It was hard to smell anything except his own drying blood, but he scented the air for any sign of Stiles, any trace of his missing pack members. He was out of sight of the road in moments, running as fast as he could without collapsing again. His body had healed but that took energy and if he pushed himself too much he’d end up fainting which wouldn’t help Stiles. So he was barely faster than an average human runner as he dodged his way along the line where town met woods. 

Every few minutes, he paused to catch his breath and scent the air more carefully. Nothing. He ran on. Every minute that it took to find Stiles was another minute he was in danger. Peter had been deranged. The way he’d lashed out at Derek hadn’t shown any sign of thought behind it. If Peter were operating on instinct alone, then he might do anything to Stiles. 

Fury and fear were the only things keeping Derek on his feet right now. He should have paid closer attention to Peter. He hadn’t even seen Peter stand up because he’d been too busy wallowing in misery inside the house. If he’d been watching, he might have realised what was going on sooner and stopped Peter before he’d attacked. He hadn’t even fought. He’d just stood there while Peter attacked him and hadn’t considered what that might mean for Stiles. He was an idiot! And now Stiles might die for it. 

Like everyone else who’d died because of him. 

Derek’s phone started to ring and he came to an abrupt stop, desperately hoping that this was Laura with good news. The number on the screen was unfamiliar but Derek answered instantly, afraid and hopeful in the same instant. 

“Yes?” he asked. 

“Mr Hale?” A man’s voice, but not Stiles’. Derek hadn’t realised until then that he’d been hoping the caller was Stiles, telling him he was safe. 

“Yes, this is Derek Hale. What is it?” 

“I’m calling from the debt recovery program. You are listed as the employer of one... erm...” There was a hesitation and then the man continued with, “Mr Stilinski.” Presumably the hesitation had been when the guy saw Stiles’ real first name. 

“Yes, I am. What’s this about?” Derek’s stomach was tied in knots of fear. What if someone had found Stiles’ body? 

“Our automated systems have flagged some unusual activity on his GPS tracker.” 

Derek’s heart skipped a beat. He’d forgotten that ankle cuff. A cuff that signalled Stiles’ exact position. Derek had never imagined he’d feel grateful to the debtors’ program. He tried to sound calm as he asked, “Where is it saying he is?” 

“Mr Stilinski isn’t with you?” the man asked. 

“He’s with a family member. At least, he should be. Where is he?” 

“Beacon Hills High School. Do you need me to contact the police to apprehend him?” 

“No,” Derek said. “No, that’s fine. I’m in Beacon Hills with my family, including the person that Stiles was hired to look after. Everything’s perfectly fine.” 

“Do you need me to make a note in his file?” 

“No. Absolutely not. Everything’s great.” 

Derek hung up and tried to keep calm. He called Laura and told her what had just happened, blurting it out in as few words as he could manage and then taking off for the school at a run. He wasn’t far away; the school was on the outskirts of town not far from the preserve. It was shut up and quiet for the weekend, but, as he approached, Derek picked up a few voices on the wind, kids laughing and joking. They were probably using the lacrosse pitch or the athletics track for some out of hours practice. 

He moved slower now, desperation mingled with caution. Peter was still a threat. Derek didn’t want to risk even more harm to Stiles by doing yet another stupid thing. He edged out of the trees, the lacrosse pitch coming into view. As he’d expected, he saw a group of about half a dozen teens tossing a ball back and forth with their sticks. They didn’t look like they’d seen a half-mad werewolf dragging a frightened teenager through here, so Derek guessed they didn’t know anything about Peter and Stiles. 

Derek went behind the stands so they wouldn’t notice him and headed around the school building. That’s when he caught the scents, Stiles and Peter mingled together, carried on the light breeze. The guy on the phone had been right. They’d been here. Derek reached the parking lot and there, a few spaces over from a silver Porsche that presumably belonged to one of the boys on the pitch, was the Camaro. 

Derek forced himself to pause. He scented the air again. He listened. He watched. The only sign of Peter and Stiles was their scent in their air. They’d passed through here and presumably they were close if this was where they’d parked, where the GPS tracker had located Stiles, but they weren’t in the immediate vicinity. 

He crept forward, crouching low where the scents were stronger. He wanted to sniff the ground like a bloodhound, but a crouched walk was good enough. Lower down, the wind had had less chance to disperse the scents. He followed the trail around the front of the school to the big sign bearing the words Beacon Hills High School. Derek knew exactly where Peter had gone and wondered why the hell he’d not thought of it sooner. If Peter was acting on instinct, if he wanted to go somewhere safe with the house destroyed, of course he’d head to the vault. 

Derek sent Laura a new text and edged closer to the sign. He found the grate that was the trigger to the secret entrance but he didn’t activate it. The sign was in position over the entrance, blocking the stairs. As soon as Derek triggered the doorway, Peter would know and then anything might happen to Stiles. As much as Derek wanted to charge in and fight, he had to play this safe. Even as he was thinking this, a text came from Laura telling him not to approach Peter alone unless he had no choice. She was fretting about his health needlessly, but it was still an order from his alpha, and one rooted in common sense. He texted Laura to hurry and, instead of rushing headlong into danger, he dropped down and pressed his ear to the ground. Even with werewolf hearing, it was difficult to hear through feet of rock and concrete, but there were voices somewhere beneath him. Derek let out a long, relieved sigh, as he heard Stiles’ voice. 

Derek caught the tail end whatever it was Stiles had been saying, “… seriously creepy.” 

Derek wasn’t sure what to expect in response. He wasn’t sure Peter had regained his mind enough to make a response, but what came next were actual words, spoken in a voice hoarse with disuse, one Derek hadn’t heard in so long that it sounded completely unfamiliar. 

“I’ll take care of you,” Peter said, with pauses between his words as though saying them was a struggle, as though each one was dredged up from some deep recesses of memory. 

“Now that just sounds even more creepy,” Stiles said. Derek wished he could somehow tell Stiles to stop arguing. If Peter was violent and out of control, Stiles shouldn’t risk doing anything to antagonise him. The strong desire to rush in and protect Stiles was back. 

“I can give you want you need,” Peter said. The pauses were still there. 

“That sounds like the opening line of a porno,” Stiles countered, “and I definitely don’t want to go there in a creepy basement with a guy who looks like a wolfman out of a B-list horror movie. No offence.” 

No offence? Was Stiles out of his mind? Derek held back a growl. He had to be quiet. Right now, Peter had no idea he was here and as long as Derek didn’t do anything stupid, it would stay that way. There was enough to muffle noise that if Derek was quiet, Peter wouldn’t hear anything. The sealed-off entrance to the vault meant that Derek’s scent wouldn’t be getting through either. 

There was quiet from below him. Derek didn’t know if that meant no one was talking, or if they were just talking too quietly for him to pick anything up. He tried to piece together what he knew of the situation based on what he’d heard, reminding himself that he had undeniable proof that Stiles was alive. Peter was talking and walking around, and presumably in his shifted form. That should help with his healing, but Derek wasn’t sure if Peter healing was a good thing or a bad thing. It might help with making him more rational, but it also might make him stronger. Maybe Derek ought to go down there now, while Peter was still getting used to moving around again. 

He was still considering this when there came a loud, “Holy crap,” from Stiles. 

Stiles continued, “Where the hell did this come from?” 

“I’ll take care of you.” 

“Holy crap,” Stiles said again, and Derek wondered what the hell was going on down there. Stiles sounded more excited than scared. That had to be a good thing. 

“I’ll take care of you. You’ll be my new pack.” 

That was a good sign. If Peter was talking about making Stiles pack, it probably meant he didn’t plan on killing him. 

“You don’t need a new pack,” Stiles said. “You’ve got a pack. You’ve got Derek and Cora and Laura.” 

Peter growled loudly enough that Derek could feel the vibrations of it through the earth. Stiles gave a yelp of surprise and Derek’s heart raced in fear on Stiles’ behalf, but the surprise wasn’t followed by any noise of pain. Derek forced himself to calm down again. 

“They’re your pack,” Stiles said. “Your family.” 

“They abandoned me!” Peter roared and Derek didn’t need to strain at all to make out those words. 

“They’ve been trying to help you.” 

“They left me alone! They were my pack and they left me with humans!” Peter gave another roar and the ground trembled again. Derek trembled on Stiles’ behalf, aware of how vulnerable the human was down there alone with Peter. Derek was tempted to give up waiting for his alpha and just open up the entrance. He wanted to run down there and make sure Stiles was safe. 

But Stiles didn’t sound at all scared when he replied, “They left you in a medical facility because they thought you needed medical help. They thought that was the best thing for you.” 

“I needed pack. I was all alone, locked in pain, and they left me alone with strangers. They abandoned me. They’ll pay. I’ll take the alpha powers and then I’ll make myself a new pack.” 

Derek nearly stopped breathing. Peter planned to kill Laura. He hadn’t cared one way or the other about Derek, but taking the alpha powers from Laura meant killing her. Derek almost wondered if he should text Laura again and warn her to stay away. 

“So,” Stiles said, “your grand plan is to murder your niece and then bite me? Does it not occur to you that I might not want to be in the pack of a guy who murdered my friend?” 

From the silence that followed, presumably that hadn’t occurred to him. 

“She abandoned me,” Peter snarled again. 

“She made a mistake,” Stiles countered. “The world is full of people who try to help someone they love and get it wrong. There was this woman who was convinced that vaccinations were full of dangerous chemicals so she refused to let her kids get vaccinated and every single one of them got whooping cough. There are religious fanatics who are determined to save their gay kids from the fires of hell and send them into anti-gay treatments that psychologically scar them. Laura thought leaving you with doctors and nurses was the best thing for you.” 

Derek was torn between fury that Stiles would compare Laura’s actions to those sort of behaviours, and grief at all that had happened. The anger was made all the worse because there was a strong chance that Stiles was right. Pack was everything to a werewolf and Peter felt like he’d been cast aside. That brought with it pain that would be hard for a human to understand unless they’d been tossed onto the streets by their parents. He’d agreed with Laura about leaving Peter in the long term care facility. He was as guilty as Laura for abandoning Peter. No wonder Peter had tried to rip his throat out. 

Laura’s car pulled into the school parking lot and Derek hurried away from the sign. As Laura and Cora leapt out of the car, Derek pressed a finger to his lips. He spoke to them in a whisper, confident that Peter wouldn’t be able to hear as long as they were careful. 

“They’re down in the vault,” Derek said. “I could hear them talking. Peter wants to kill you and use the alpha powers to turn Stiles.” 

“What?” Cora asked, louder than Derek liked. He clapped a hand to her mouth. Cora backed away from his hand with a glare, but she got the message. Derek explained the rest of what he’d heard, including Stiles’ arguments in favour of not murdering Laura. 

“I need to talk to Peter,” Laura said. 

“Maybe Derek and I should go in first,” Cora said. “If he’s not actively trying to kill us, we can talk to Peter and apologise.” 

Derek nodded and told Laura, “He might attack you as soon as he sees you.” 

He was thinking about the way Peter had been talking. The more he’d spoken, the easier his words had come. He’d seen to change from completely dazed to slightly focused in the few minutes he’d fought Derek out at the old house. It was possible that whatever was healing Peter was still in progress and taking some time. The longer they left it, the more intelligence Peter might bring to the situation. Stalling until Peter was more reasonable might be the best bet, but Derek didn’t want to leave Stiles alone down there. 

“I’ll go and talk to him,” Derek said. 

“No,” Laura snapped. 

“He let me go before. If I just go and talk to him, maybe we can have a rational conversation and I can talk him down from trying to kill you.” 

“You can barely stand.” 

That was an exaggeration. Derek might be a little shaky and hungry enough to eat the entire contents of a restaurant, but his injuries were healed. 

“I’m fine,” he said. 

“It might not be a bad idea,” said Cora. “If we want to talk to him, we don’t want him to feel threatened. Derek’s the least threatening of all of us right now.” 

Derek glared at his younger sister but he was kept from arguing with her by Laura’s nod of agreement. She agreed to let Derek go and talk to Peter but outlined a quick back up plan in case Peter was feeling less than reasonable. 

With the rough plan agreed, Cora hurried away to break into the school as quietly as possible. There were two ways into the vault and they didn’t want Peter to drag Stiles out the back way while they all stood around the front. Cora would wait outside the other entrance quietly just in case Peter decided to run that way. Laura would hold back from the front entrance so that her scent wouldn’t be too obvious while Derek opened the vault up and went down to confront Peter as unthreateningly as possible. 

He went back to the sign and bent down again to listen, while keeping an eye on Laura. She had her phone out, ready for Cora to message when she got in position. Derek strained his ears again, entirely unsurprised to find that Stiles was still arguing. He’d been arguing with Peter back when Peter was catatonic, of course he would argue now that Peter was awake. 

“… just think that you should have an alternate plan to killing everyone,” Stiles was saying. Derek definitely agreed. He wasn’t going to let Peter hurt Laura, but he really didn’t want to harm Peter in any way after all he’d been through. 

“They need to pay,” Peter said. “All that time alone. They deserve to pay.” 

“They thought you were in a coma! They didn’t think you were aware of anything around you. Do you really think people deserve to die because they make an honest mistake?” 

Peter growled, “I know why you’re defending them. I smelled it on you. Your lust.” 

“Hey! I’m not siding with anyone. I just don’t think murder should be anyone’s Plan A.” 

“You don’t deny it. You want my nephew.” 

“That is completely beside the point.” 

“I don’t have to hurt him,” Peter said. “Once I’ve become the alpha, he can stay my beta and you can have him.” 

There was a pause. For an instant, Derek wondered if Stiles was considering it, but then his voice came back, filled with anger and loud enough that Derek could hear clearly. 

“Are you kidding me?” Stiles demanded. “You can’t just decide to give me Derek. People aren’t property! Your head still needs some serious healing if you think you can win me over by promising to give me your nephew.” 

Derek noticed movement out of the corner of one eye. Laura was waving frantically. From the expression on her face, she’d been trying to get his attention for a while. She gave him a thumbs up, the agreed upon signal that Cora was in position. Derek returned the gesture and prepared to go into the vault. He wanted to get down there quickly before Stiles said something that would antagonise Peter into violence. 

Derek shifted his hand, letting his claws emerge, and slid them into the grating that served as the lock for the vault. He twisted back and forth, feeling the spark of power dance against his fingers as the mechanism inside came to life and the grinding of stone began. The sign twisted sideways to reveal the stairs. If there were voices below now, Derek couldn’t hear them over the grating noise of the entrance opening. 

“Peter,” Derek called. “It’s me. I’m here to talk.” 

Derek started cautiously down the stairs.


	14. Chapter 14

Derek went slowly down into the vault, concerned with every step that Peter might leap at him. The gate at the bottom of the stairs was already open onto the shadowy space beyond, with all the shelves of storage for objects his family had considered too important to throw away but hadn’t needed or wanted in the house. Derek hadn’t been down here since before the fire. There were boxes here of strange, creepy things, of herbs his mother had collected, artefacts and artwork that had been given as gifts by other packs and so couldn’t be thrown away. He had never liked this place and he didn’t want to be here now. 

“Oh thank god you’re not dead,” Stiles said. He stood a little behind Peter, looking completely unharmed. Derek took a moment to look Stiles up and down, making sure of that, and breathed a little easier that there was no sign of injury, no smell of blood except what Derek had brought with him. He turned his attention back to Peter, who stood in shifted form in the middle of the vault, between Derek and an open safe. He was growling a little. 

“Peter,” Derek said. “I’m sorry. I heard you talking with Stiles. I know why you’re so angry. I understand and I’m sorry, but you can’t kill Laura. She did the best she could.” 

“She abandoned me!” Peter roared again. 

“She was eighteen!” Derek roared back. “She was eighteen and grieving and trying to be a parent to me and Cora while fighting with social services for the right to have custody of us. You were in a coma, Peter. So, yeah, she left you in a place where you could get the actual medical treatment you needed.” 

“I needed pack,” Peter snarled. 

Derek was tense, waiting in case Peter attacked, but he didn’t let that deter him. “Maybe, with hindsight, it wasn’t the best choice, but she didn’t have hindsight. Laura was a scared eighteen-year-old in way over her head making the best choices she could with the information she had. And you’re not going to kill her for that.” 

Derek knew that Laura was probably listening to every word and what he said was for her as much as for Peter. He didn’t want her driving herself crazy with guilt over something she’d had no way to know. 

“I was alone. I was trapped in my head and I needed pack. The fact that a human,” Peter jabbed a claw in Stiles’ direction, making the human in question jump back a step, “could see what you couldn’t proves he has more right to be pack than any of you.” 

Derek couldn’t argue about Stiles deserving to be pack. Stiles had found a place in their lives in a remarkably short space of time. He wasn’t going to roll over on any of the rest of Peter’s points though and he needed a way to break through Peter’s anger and get to whatever sense of reason his suffering had left him with. Derek glanced towards Stiles, who was backed up against the shelves, clutching something tightly in one hand. Everything about his posture was tense. Derek scented the air, taking in what was detectable even over the overwhelming stench of his blood clinging to his clothes. He remembered Peter back at the house, breathing in Stiles’ scent. 

“What do you smell, Peter?” Derek asked. 

Peter gave him a puzzled look. He sniffed. 

“I smell us,” he said. “And blood. Don’t expect me to apologise for that.” 

“I also smell fear,” Derek said. He looked significantly towards Stiles. Stiles glared at Derek in a way that implied he would prefer to be left out of Derek’s arguments. 

“You want a pack,” Derek continued, “but the person you want in your pack is afraid of you right now.” 

Peter glanced across at Stiles. He seemed to get angrier. 

“I told you I’d take care of you,” Peter snarled. 

Stiles edged along the line of shelves, knocking a couple of the boxes as he tried to put a little bit more distance between him and Peter. 

“Yeah,” Stiles said, “and that’s great and all, but you snarling and threatening to kill people doesn’t fill me with confidence about your mental state right now.” 

“I understand why you’re angry,” Derek said again. “You have a right to be angry. But that doesn’t mean you should take it out on other people. If you want a pack, then let us be a pack. Let us make it up to you for the mistakes we’ve made.” 

“I’m sorry, Peter,” Laura said, suddenly there on the stairs behind Derek. Derek watched Peter for any sign of attack, any sign that he was going to hurt her. He wasn’t going to let anything happen to his sister. But Peter didn’t move. 

“I’m sorry,” Laura said again. “We didn’t mean to abandon you. Come home with us. Let’s be a pack again.” 

She moved slowly to Derek’s side. Still Peter didn’t move. Then Laura took a step into the space between them, holding out her hand. 

Peter growled again, a low noise deep in his throat, “You left me.” 

“They also took you back again,” Stiles said. “They brought me in to look after you. You want to be mad at them for some stuff they’ve done, that’s fair enough, but you should give them credit too. Without them, I wouldn’t be here.” 

Peter seemed to be listening, at least Derek hoped so. He hadn’t attacked any of them. That was a fragile thing to build hope on, but still Derek did so. Peter was still in there, the real Peter, the man he’d been before the fire. Yes, he was angry, but he was aware enough now to show some rationality. Stiles’ words or their apologies had broken through at least a little. 

“Really, you shouldn’t kill anyone as an impulse decision,” Stiles continued. “I mean, if you decide not to kill Laura today, you could always change your mind and kill her tomorrow.” 

Derek clenched his jaw. He wanted to ask Stiles what the hell he was thinking with a statement like that, but he held his tongue since Stiles had done a good job of getting through to Peter so far. Peter had obviously formed a connection with Stiles so, of all of them, he might be the best person to convince him. 

“If you kill Laura right now though,” Stiles continued, “you can’t take it back. If you change your mind tomorrow, she’ll still be dead. So the sensible thing to do is to take your time and think it over carefully before jumping into murder and mayhem.” 

“I have thought about it,” Peter snarled. “I’ve thought about it every day since the fire. Once I take the alpha power, my healing will be complete and I can make a pack that will stay with me.” 

“Is the healing thing really necessary?” Stiles asked. “You seem to be healing pretty well now, especially considering you couldn’t even put your own pants on this morning. I guess it’s like an exponential growth thing: tiny change, tiny change, tiny change, and then suddenly boom, everything goes really, really big. If you keep healing the way you have been, you’ll be back to a hundred percent in no time.” 

Peter looked angry again. Presumably he didn’t like having his excuses snatched away from him. 

“I want justice,” Peter said. His eyes locked on Laura. “You need to pay for hurting me.” 

Peter was like a trapped animal, his fury simmering away, ready to boil over at an instant. All the reasonable words were getting through to him, but every time his anger seemed to diminish for a moment, it surged right back. He looked like he was ready to claw Laura’s face off. Derek’s need to protect his alpha filled him, along with the guilt for how Peter had suffered. How they’d all suffered. 

“She’s not the one who hurt you,” Derek said. Eyes turned to him. The secret was like a lead weight inside him. It was time to set it down. If Peter killed him for it, so be it. “I’m the reason the hunters were able to get close to the house.” 

“What are you talking about, Derek?” Laura asked. 

“Kate Argent. She took my clothes to hide her scent. She was… We’d been together and she took my clothes while I was asleep. It’s my fault.” 

Laura looked at Derek with disgust and fury on her face. Derek looked down at the floor, unable to look his sister in the face and see the consequences of his actions. He waited for the claws, for the fury to turn into violence. It had been a long time coming but he was ready for it. 

“Together?” Laura asked. “Together as in… you were having sex?” 

Her voice was hard, disgust lining every word. Derek nodded. He could try to explain, try to say that he’d thought Kate had loved him, but it had been his stupidity that had let him fall prey to Kate’s advances. If he’d thought with his head instead of his groin, his family would be alive right now, Peter wouldn’t be threatening the only pack he had left. Derek wasn’t going to make excuses. 

“You were sixteen!” Laura said. “She took advantage of a sixteen-year-old to… Oh god, Derek. Why didn’t you ever tell me?” 

“I couldn’t.” Derek wanted her to hurry up and get it over with. If she took much longer, he was going to start crying. The tears were already pushing behind his eyes. “I couldn’t bear for you to hate me for killing our pack.” 

“No, Derek. No. You didn’t kill anyone. She used you. She’s the one to blame.” 

She stepped closer but not with claws. Her arms wrapped around him and she pulled him against her chest. Derek closed his eyes and felt her warmth, her strength pressed against him, the reassurance of alpha and pack and family, the promise that he wasn’t alone, no matter what. The tears did slide free now, held back for too many years. He clung to Laura and sobbed into her shoulder. Her scent filled him, the reassurance of her touch. She didn’t hate him. She knew the secret he’d carried for so long, but she still held him close as a member of her pack. The kind acceptance was enough to break him completely. 

Derek had almost forgotten Peter’s presence in the vault, but now Peter’s low growl made the air throb with anger. 

“She’s to blame,” Peter growled. 

Derek tried to pull himself back together. They weren’t out of danger yet. Derek couldn’t be sure that the she Peter was talking about wasn’t Laura and he needed to keep his alpha safe. But Laura just turned towards Peter. 

“You want revenge?” she said. “You want to get back at the people responsible for your pain? Let’s go after the Argents as a pack.” 

Peter’s anger had turned into a vicious grin. 

“I’m going to tear that bitch’s throat out.” 

Laura grinned back, “For what she did to Derek, I’ll let you.” 

Derek found himself sharing in that thrill of decision. The thought of Kate still filled him with a sick dread, a terror beyond any physical fear, but there was excitement too in this choice. After so long, they could get real closure. The murderer of their family had walked free for years and now that would end. The admission of her name by Derek had been like the judge’s gavel slamming down, declaring that justice was about to be served. 

Laura held out a hand. Peter looked at it for a long moment before clasping it tightly. It wasn’t the casual intimacy of pack, but it was a start. It was a promise of justice. Maybe by the time Argent blood was flowing freely, Peter would be healed in more ways and they could be a real pack again. 

Stiles cleared his throat, “Um… just so I’m clear… are we now plotting to murder someone?” 

That burgeoning excitement vanished, replaced with a cold dread. Stiles wasn’t a killer. Stiles hadn’t been a part of the pack at the time of the fire so he shouldn’t be caught up in the brutality of their vengeance. More than that, Stiles was human, vulnerable. Going after hunters would be dangerous. They couldn’t risk Stiles getting hurt because of this fight. 

“We need to keep you out of it,” Derek said. 

“Now I’m OK in principal with being left out of death and destruction but I’m still stuck on the part about you plotting murder. I mean, I get that this person killed your pack so I see why you’d be mad at her, but maybe you could call the police? Give them the evidence and let them arrest her.” 

“The police investigated the fire,” Laura said, “and couldn’t determine if the fire was accidental or arson. They’re not going to care about a case that’s six years old, especially since the only new evidence is Derek’s word. Besides, we can’t exactly tell them that Kate’s motive was the fact we’re werewolves.” 

“So we’re back to murder as the best option?” Stiles said. 

“It’s justice,” said Peter. “Not murder.” 

Stiles looked between all of them and said, “Fine. I guess I’m not going to win this argument. I just don’t think we should be so quick to rule out the possibility of a plan B.” 

“Such as?” Derek asked. 

Stiles paused. He chewed his lip. He shrugged. 

“I’ll have to get back to you on that,” he said. 

Laura around at them all, “Come on. For now, we should go home. Derek needs something substantial to eat before he passes out and we need to plan. If we’re going after the Argents, we’re not going to rush in until we’ve done some serious strategic thinking. Let’s head back.” 

“Does this mean I can stop standing out here?” Cora called, her voice muffled by the back entrance of the vault. Laura called out for her to come in and Cora opened it up with another grinding of stone. 

“Let’s go back to the cars,” Laura said. She started for the stairs. 

“Um…” said Stiles, “before we go… are you aware that that’s a pretty major fortune in that safe?” 

He waved what he’d been clutching tightly during this whole conversation. Derek had been too concerned about Peter to care very much about it, but now he looked closer and saw the papers, with dollar amounts printed on very official-looking paper. 

“What are you talking about?” Laura asked. 

“Bearer bonds,” Stiles said. He held the papers towards them. “There’s a whole pile of them in there.” 

“A hundred and seventeen million,” Peter said. 

“Well, a hundred and sixteen now,” Stiles corrected, waving the stack of papers he held. 

“There’s been a hundred and seventeen million dollars down here this whole time?” Laura asked. “You’ve got to be frigging kidding me!”


	15. Chapter 15

Three burgers, a shower and a change of clothes later, and Derek felt considerably better. He sat at the kitchen table back at their house, working his way through a pile of sandwiches, and staring at the bag full of bearer bonds. Of all the things that had happened in the past day, Derek wasn’t sure which was the more astonishing: that Peter was walking around and talking, that his sister didn’t hate him for what he’d done with Kate, or that they’d had a fortune in bonds sitting in their vault this whole time. 

The others sat around the table, Peter to one side, Laura on the other, Cora and Stiles across from Derek. Laura was staring at the bonds as though they were fairy money and might vanish any second. 

“Mom said we had savings,” Laura said, “but I just thought she was talking about the stocks. She never told me the combination for the safe.” She reached out and ran her hands over the stocks. “All this time.” 

“It’s a really bad way to invest money,” Stiles said. 

“What do you mean?” 

“Well, you don’t get any interest. Criminals use bonds for money laundering and stuff because they’re untraceable, but inflation basically means that your money is worth less and less over time. As a long-term investment strategy it sucks.” 

“Talia was worried about the hunters,” Peter said. “She thought we might need to go into hiding, so she liquefied a lot of assets. She wanted to make sure we would have a source of funds the hunters wouldn’t be able to trace.” 

“I guess she was right to worry,” said Laura. 

“Still,” said Stiles, “unless you’re expecting to have to go on the run after your murder plot, there are a lot better things you could be doing with that money.” 

Derek couldn’t help remembering that the first arrangement of tutoring had been around economics. This was a subject Stiles knew about. So Derek asked, “What would you do with it?” 

“Property. Invest in low-cost housing; there will always be people who need a place to live. Get enough tenants and you’ll have a steady stream of regular income so you don’t have to worry about your money running out. Invest some in start-ups and small businesses. You’ve got enough that you can spread the risk. Some of those start-ups will flop and you’ll lose your investment, but some will go steady and do a decent business, and, if you’re lucky, some will go big and you can make a nice sum when the company goes public or gets bought out. If you’re sensible and don’t go splurging it all on private jets and solid gold yachts, a sum like this could keep you going basically forever.” 

“A hundred and sixteen million dollars,” Laura said. There was a dreamlike quality to her voice, like she expected to wake up any moment. 

“A hundred and seventeen,” Stiles corrected. He touched the stack in front of him on the table. 

“A hundred and sixteen,” Laura repeated. “Peter gave that to you. He has as much right as any of us to decide what to do with this money. If he wants you to have it, I’m not going to argue.” 

She glanced at Peter, sitting beside them. He hadn't said much since they'd left Beacon Hills, but there was no forgetting his presence. Derek still wasn’t sure if this was something to celebrate or be afraid of, but Peter just nodded when Laura talked about letting Stiles keep the money Peter had offered. Peter had promised to take care of Stiles and this was his way of doing so. 

Stiles started laughing, “And to think I was concerned about never paying off my debt. I can pay the debt, repay with interest everyone who donated the charity fund Scott set up, and hire the slickest lawyer I can find to sue the asses off my dad’s insurance company.” 

“Your dad was insured?” Derek asked. 

“Yeah, of course, but when he got hospitalised, the insurance company were a nightmare. They kept querying everything and making me jump through hoops to try and get them to pay for anything. They kept saying things weren’t covered or that we had to pay stupidly high amounts in co-pay, stuff like that. Everyone said I should just wait and let me dad handle it when he got better because they’d have a harder time arguing with a sheriff than a teenager, so I let it carry on. Then… then when Dad died, the hospital said I owed them thousands and the insurance company claimed that the policy was no longer valid because dad was dead, and we’d missed two mortgage payments because of the whole mess and so…” Stiles touched the stack of bonds again. “I can sue them for the hospital bills and damages and everything and I can use the money I get from that to pay the debts of other people who’ve been screwed over.” 

Stiles had a wicked grin on his face as he said it. The thought of taking down his dad’s insurance company clearly filled him with glee as much as the thought of helping others. 

Laura started taking piles of bonds out of the bag. 

“Cora needs a college fund,” she said, stacking up several bonds worth a thousand dollars apiece. “And, Derek, you might want to do some college at an actual college.” Laura considered and then added another clutch of bonds to that pile, before starting to build a second pile. “We should keep some aside for miscellaneous expenses, emergencies, all that.” The emergency fund pile was probably worth about a million dollars. “Then there’s the property investment.” She grabbed a whole handful. “How much do you reckon that should be? We could buy apartment blocks to rent out. Ten million? Twenty? That should definitely give us enough income never to need to worry again.” There was a large pile on the table now, but the pile in the bag still seemed enormous. Laura stared at it, “We could pay off a lot of people’s debts with that.” 

“It’s not as simple as that,” said Stiles. “Don’t get me wrong, paying off debts would be awesome and there will be a lot of grateful people, but the whole system is broken. Paying off three or four debts is amazing, but it gets harder the more people you get out. If you pay of the debts of a hundred people, that’s awesome, but you’ll be left with a hundred people with no jobs, nowhere to live, and nothing to live on. The economy’s still a mess and people are prejudiced against hiring former debtors, so ninety-something of those hundred people will end up back in the system by the end of the year. There needs to be somewhere for people to go when they get out of the program, some way for them to earn money to stand on their own feet.” 

“Do you have something in mind?” Derek asked. 

“I said you should invest in start-ups,” Stiles answered. “Maybe you could invest in start-ups that specifically hire former debtors.” 

“It’s a good idea,” Laura said. 

It was a good idea, but one that would need planning as carefully as the proposed vengeance against the Argents. It would give Stiles something to work towards that would keep him out of the fight, and Derek was glad about that. He didn’t want Stiles anywhere near the Argents’ line of fire. They also needed to get information about other debtors, which had to be factored in, so the plan that they agreed upon around that kitchen table was one that would keep Stiles safe when things became violent with the Argents, but they had to put contingencies in place. 

In the days after Peter’s sudden recovery, Derek had several meetings with the bank, made a number of deposits, and then hired a lawyer to write up some new wills. If everything went thoroughly wrong and they were killed in the conflict with the Argents, at least Stiles would be safe. It was written into all of the wills that if they were to die or end up unable to manage their own affairs, the lawyer would arrange for a transfer of funds large enough to cover Stiles’ debt and get him out of the program. If they all ended up dead, Stiles would be the sole inheritor of everything they owned. 

In the meantime, there were a lot of other meetings to be had. Derek talked with a lot of real estate people, looking at different properties. Derek wanted to make his purchases quickly and it seemed that the owners most eager to make a fast sale were the ones with properties in horrible condition. Some were better than others, but there were a few that would need a lot of work before they were usable. As Derek signed the paperwork for an apartment building that had holes in some of the walls, he told himself that this was a good thing. If there was work to be done, then they’d definitely be able to hire people to do it. A week after Peter’s recovery, the Hale family were proud owners of three apartment buildings, an office building, a former factory, a warehouse, a small field, and a closed-down shopping mall with about fifty small retail units. The ownership was split, with some of the properties in each of their names. 

Derek had a very, very long list of work that needed to be done on each of the properties, but now they had somewhere for freed debtors to go, and jobs they could be hired to do. They were ready for the next stage of Stiles’ plan. 

It was a Monday morning when Derek took Stiles back to the building where they’d first met. Stiles spent the journey fidgeting. The whole car filled with the scent of his nerves. 

“You can change your mind,” Derek said. “We can just pay off your debt right now. You don’t have to do this.” 

“Yeah I do. There’s no other way to get the codes of the people who most need help.” 

Derek felt almost as anxious as Stiles about sending him in there. They would have no way to communicate. Stiles would be deliberately signing up to be treated badly and he would have no way to ask for help if it was more than he could cope with. Once they did this, it would be out of Derek’s hands. 

“One week,” Derek said. “One week and then your debt will be paid.” 

Either Derek would do it himself, or the lawyer would handle it should anything happen to the pack when they went up against the Argents. Derek had copied the legal papers and given them to Scott when he came to see Stiles again. Scott knew everything about Stiles’ part of the plan. He didn’t know about werewolves or their plan to attack the Argents, but he knew enough to be sure that the lawyer would keep his side of the agreement. 

“It’ll be fine,” Stiles said. “I’ll keep my head down and the week will go by in no time.” 

That would be more reassuring if Derek didn’t know it was a lie. Stiles didn’t plan on keeping his head down. He planned on talking to every indentured worker he could manage to find out their account codes and the amount of money they owed. If whoever hired Stiles punished workers for talking on the job, Stiles would be asking for trouble every minute of every day for that week. 

“Don’t take any unnecessary risks,” Derek said. Stiles rolled his eyes and didn’t promise anything. 

“The same goes for you. Don’t get yourself burned alive by werewolf hunters or anything.” 

“I’ll try my best,” Derek said. That was the closest he would come to a promise. 

They reached the big grey building that housed the Beacon Hills’ branch of the debtor’s program. Derek parked the Camaro and took a moment to steel his resolve. Stiles was no more eager to get out of the car than he was, but eventually he opened the door and stepped out. He was wearing the ugly clothes that he’d been given the last time he’d been here. The only other things he was bringing with him were a few sheets of paper and a stub of pencil. One paper contained a print-out of Stiles’ account statements, another had some basic calculations of hourly rates into daily wages, some more held the legal terms of the program. The cover story was that Stiles wanted to be able to calculate his debt even if he didn’t have access to a computer and Derek had charged him a few cents for the print costs to say that Stiles owned these items. They didn’t think anyone would argue about Stiles keeping them, and the fact that each sheet was printed only on one side meant that Stiles would have plenty of room to write down account codes. 

They headed inside and Derek gave his name at reception. A few minutes later, the two of them were shown into the office of the woman who had conducted Derek’s first meeting here. She seemed alarmed to see them. 

“I want to get a replacement worker for Stiles,” Derek said. 

“Is there something wrong with his service?” the woman asked. “You didn’t submit any complaints.” 

“No complaints,” Derek said, “but the situation has changed. I need to interview the other available workers to find someone more suitable for the job. How many workers do you have here at the moment?” 

“Seven,” she said. Derek had hoped for more, but the low number wasn’t surprising. This organisation made more money when the debtors were out working, so only a few would be here at any given time. It meant that their actions would have more of an impact on the employers and the organisation as a whole though. 

“I’d like to interview all of them,” Derek said, “to find the best candidate. In the meantime, you should arrange for Stiles to get into some other work as quickly as possible.” 

“Preferably somewhere awful,” Stiles said. 

The woman frowned. “What?” 

“Nowhere pornish, if possible,” Stiles continued, “but somewhere really bad. Somewhere that even the sham of an inspection program comes up with things to be concerned about, and with a lot of workers.” 

“Why the hell would you ask to go somewhere like that?” she asked. 

Stiles smiled, “Maybe I’m a masochist? It doesn’t really matter, does it? Your job is to find me a job. If the job of sending teenagers into horrific working conditions stresses you out so much that you need to find a new job, so much the better. I’m sure you’ll land on your feet, especially with the money you’ve got set aside for a rainy day.” 

That was Derek’s cue. He reached into a back pocket and pulled out a sheaf of notes held together by an elastic band. Thirty bonds, each worth a thousand dollars. The woman picked them up. She stared at them, probably trying to work out if they were genuine. Not many people saw bearer bonds on a regular basis so she was probably looking to see if this was a trick. She looked up at Stiles. 

“There’s more than enough here to pay your debt,” she said. 

“Entirely untraceable,” Stiles smiled. Stiles liked this woman. She worked in a corrupt system and she knew it, but he claimed she was just trying to get by and look after her family. They were offering her a way to escape the daily guilt brought by her career choice, and Stiles was confident she’d take it. Derek waited, watching for some sign that she’d betray them. 

“What have you got planned?” she asked. “An article about conditions? I saw the economics one. A human rights law suit?” 

“If you don’t ask questions, you can honestly say you don’t know anything when people start looking for someone to blame.” 

The woman considered, staring at the bonds. She put them into her purse and smiled. 

“I’m sure I can find you somewhere to work,” she said. “Now, let’s get you processed back in while Mr Hale interviews for his next employee.” 

Derek put a hand on Stiles’ shoulder and gave it a gentle squeeze. This wasn’t goodbye. He wasn’t going to let this be goodbye. They’d take out Kate Argent and then he’d be back to set Stiles free. He wasn’t going to say anything that sounded final. 

He guessed Stiles was thinking something similar, because he smiled and said, “See you soon.” 

Derek nodded, and then he let himself be taken to the interview room. 

The first debtor was brought in after a few minutes, a skinny, black woman who looked like she was trying to make herself smaller. Derek waited until the guard had left them alone and then he brought out his phone. 

“I want you to tell me your account codes,” Derek said between swipes, “and the amount of money you owe.” 

“I don’t have to tell you that,” the woman said. 

“You don’t, but you might want to.” By now, Derek had his banking app open and showing his account balance. He turned the screen round so the woman could see. “I recently had a substantial windfall. Now, I haven’t the faintest idea how to spend that much money, so I figured I could do some good with it.” 

“You’re going to pay my debt?” 

“Not right now, but in about a week. Myself and some associates are collecting account codes. The plan is to pay as many debts as possible at the same time, to get people out of the system before the people in charge have a chance to find a loophole to stop us.” 

The woman looked like she might cry as she told him her codes and said that she owed seven hundred dollars.

Derek noted down the details on his phone and then knocked on the door, telling the guard that she wasn’t suitable and he needed to interview the next candidate. The following two conversations were very similar, but the guy after that was deeply suspicious. He glared at Derek as though waiting for a trap. He kept asking why Derek would do something like this, refusing to believe that Derek might just want to help people. He kept asking about the catch, about what Derek would do with his debt. Over and over again, Derek reassured him that the payment would be a gift without any obligations attached. 

“So no matter how much money I owe,” the man said, “you’ll just pay the debt and not ask anything in return?” 

“I promise.” 

“Fine. In that case, I owe ten thousand dollars.” Derek doubted the guy owed anything like that much, but he decided not to argue. He took note of the amount and the account codes. This man would get any balance over and above the value of the debt so letting him have the money would still fit with their plan to help get people out of the system, and maybe it would restore his faith in humanity in the process. 

After about an hour of interviews, Derek declared that none of the candidates were suitable and headed for the Camaro alone with seven lots of account codes saved to his phone. His next stop would be the big retailer that had been his first stop when he’d picked up Stiles, since he was pretty confident they hired debtors. He couldn’t get the codes from workers in factories and sweatshops, but he could still go out of his way to hunt for those he could reach. Combined with Stiles’ efforts, by this time next week they would have enough codes to rescue enough workers to knock the foundations out from under the debtor program at least in the local area. 

Derek just hoped he would be still alive to play his part in it.


	16. Chapter 16

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I kind of love Peter's logic in this chapter - but I think that probably says terrible things about me.

“We’re not killing a teenager,” Laura was saying as Derek walked into the house. “She was barely ten years old when the fire happened; there’s no way she was involved.” 

Derek shut the front door and walked to the kitchen. Laura and Peter were glaring at each other across the table but neither seemed about to launch an attack, which was progress. Peter’s face had healed now, the angry red scars changed to smooth skin, but the emotional scars wouldn’t fade so quickly. 

“Argents train their children young,” Peter said. 

“That doesn’t mean we can justify killing children!” 

“Do I want to know what you’re talking about?” Derek asked. 

“The Argents have a daughter,” Laura said. 

“Kate has a daughter?” Derek’s voice cracked a little over Kate’s name. It was hard to grasp the concept of her having family, of her caring for anyone except as a means to an end. 

“Kate’s brother,” Peter said. 

“We’re not even sure that the brother was involved in the fire,” Laura said. “We can’t just kill people because they happen to be related to a monster or we’re no better than the hunters. We know Kate is guilty. We target her but don’t target the others.” 

“I doubt the brother will allow us to kill Kate without a fight.” 

“Fine. When he tries to kill us, then you’re allowed to kill him.” 

Peter growled, “You don’t get to decide what I’m allowed to do.” 

Derek could see this getting ugly really fast. He wasn’t sure what to do. He couldn’t get between them unless he jumped on the table, though that was weird enough that it might be an effective distraction. He decided a slight shift in the subject might be a better idea. 

“Is the plan to target Kate at home or when she’s out?” Derek asked. 

“When she’s out,” Laura said. “They will almost certainly have an arsenal in the house, probably with wolfsbane weapons. Plus, we stand a better chance of getting her alone.” 

“We could lure her out,” Peter said. 

“How?” 

“Use the girl. Get her to send a message, bring Kate to a place of our choosing.” 

“We’re not using the girl!” Laura snapped. “She’s in the same school year as Cora and Stiles. How would you feel if someone tried using Stiles like that?” 

“That he’d be effective bait,” Peter answered. 

“We have standards,” Laura said. “At least we should. We’re not going to use a teenage girl as bait. We kill the monster who raped Derek and murdered our pack, but we don’t attack people who couldn’t possibly have been involved in the fire.” 

“They’re all hunters. They’re all the same.” 

Derek wished Stiles were here, he might have been able to talk some sense into Peter. This probably wouldn’t be the last time he’d miss Stiles. He’d been gone less than a day and it was certain to be a long week. 

“There are plenty of hunters who say that about werewolves,” Laura pointed out. 

Peter gave a growl and stood abruptly. Derek tensed, waiting for him to attack, but Peter just left the room, shouldering past Derek with more force than was necessary, but not enough to do any damage. A moment later, the front door slammed. 

“Do you think he’s gone to kidnap the Argent kid?” Derek asked. 

“I really hope not,” Laura replied. They didn’t go after him. Going after Peter would definitely lead to a fight. The truce between them was lasting as long as they were targeting Kate, but the difference in approaches threatened to shatter what peace they’d managed to maintain. Peter obviously wanted to kill all the Argents and everyone who’d ever worked with them, while Laura was specifically focused on Kate. Derek thought over the words she’d just used. 

“It wasn’t really rape,” he said quietly. “Me and Kate, I mean. I agreed to it. I said yes.” 

“You were sixteen and she was in her twenties,” Laura said, and Derek tried not to think about the times he’d thought about Stiles. “More than that, she lied to you. She got you into bed by pretending to care about you, pretending to be someone she wasn’t. Sleeping with someone under false pretences is still rape.” 

Derek wanted to argue. He knew that he’d consented to all the things that he and Kate had done together. Worse, he’d enjoyed it. That thought still made him feel sick. He had been with his family’s murderer, and he’d liked it. 

Derek shifted the subject back to Peter because it was easier than talking about Kate. 

“What are we going to do about him?” Derek asked. 

Laura gave a little shrug, her face showing clearly the conflict in her thoughts, “He’s dangerous but the worst thing is that a part of me agrees with him. A part of me thinks the world would be a safer place without any Argents in it.” 

“It wouldn’t stop with the Argents,” Derek said. “We wipe them out and every other hunter around would see us as a threat and come after us.” 

“That might happen anyway. We kill Kate, the other Argents attack us. We defend ourselves against them, and other hunters come to kill us. It goes on and on. Maybe I should have used those bonds the way Mom intended: got us some false identities and started over somewhere else.” 

“There’s still a few million unallocated,” Derek said. “That’s still an option if everything goes to hell.” 

Derek didn’t want to consider it. He was a Hale, part of an old pack and proud of his heritage. Uprooting the family and taking on false identities to hide from hunters might be a strategy that made sense but it still felt like abandoning his pack. He would do it though, if it meant keeping what was left of the pack alive. 

“So,” Derek said, “the plan is to attack Kate when she’s out in the open?” 

“Yeah. Peter’s been watching her. She’s in Beacon Hills with her brother and his family. The challenge is that Kate is pretty much always armed. Peter says she has weapons in her car and he thinks she carries a concealed handgun with her as well. He didn’t want to get too close so he’s not sure if it’s loaded with wolfsbane but…” Laura trailed off with a shrugged. 

“But we have to assume it is,” Derek finished. He was a little surprised that Peter had managed to get close enough to Kate to watch her without attacking her on his own. He’d agreed to wait until Stiles was safely out of the way, some part of him still sane enough to care about protecting the human, but now Stiles was somewhere they couldn’t get to him, it was hard to know what Peter might do. He’d said they would fight Kate as a pack but Derek had no faith in Peter actually sticking to that part of the agreement. 

“The other problem,” Laura continued, “is that when she’s out and about it’s always somewhere public, somewhere with innocent people around. She goes to a coffee shop, she’s been grocery shopping, she went to a gun range. Getting her alone is going to be a problem.” 

“Maybe Peter had a point about luring her out,” Derek said. 

Laura looked at him sharply, anger on her face, “You can’t seriously want to kidnap the girl?” 

“No! God, no! I didn’t mean kidnapping someone as bait, but maybe one of us could get noticed spying on her and then run away. When she gives chase, we lead her into an ambush.” Derek was thinking of himself as the bait. Kate would recognise him. She might be tempted into giving chase. 

“Maybe. But it would have to be subtly done. If it’s obvious we’re trying to attract her attention, she’ll suspect a trap. If it’s not obvious, she might not notice at the right time to be near the ambush. We’ll keep planning. Who knows, maybe Peter will take the question out of our hands by killing her in the middle of a crowded movie theatre or something.” 

Laura’s tone was an attempt at levity, but it fell flat. They both knew there was a danger Peter might do something of the sort, so it was hard to laugh about it. 

“We should go,” Laura said. 

“Go where?” 

“To pick Cora up from school. I want us to stay together as a pack as much as possible, at least until we know what Peter is thinking.” 

Meaning that if Peter did something stupid to trigger a retribution of hunters, she wanted to be in exactly the right place to protect Derek and Cora. Derek nodded and went with her to the school. 

***  
There was no sign of trouble at the school. Cora joined them in the car and there was no sign of trouble on the drive home. There was no sign of trouble at the house when they arrived back, so Derek got on with dinner preparations while Cora started her homework. 

The first sign of trouble was when, half-way through dinner, Peter walked in through the front door covered in blood. 

“Oh my god!” Laura was on her feet in a heartbeat. 

“Oh, don’t worry,” Peter said. “The blood’s not mine.” 

“Who’s is it then?” 

“Chris Argent’s. We had a nice little chat about his sister and the fire.” 

“Meaning you tortured him to death?” Laura asked. She looked like she wanted to add to the blood on Peter’s clothes. 

“Not to death,” Peter said. “You told me I wasn’t allowed to kill him until he tried to kill us, so I let him think he’d escaped.” 

Laura growled. Peter smirked as though he’d won a point in some game, and that made Derek want to attack him. He’d been afraid of Peter doing something reckless and he wished now that he’d at least tried to stop Peter leaving the house earlier. 

“You attacked a hunter,” Laura said, “tortured him, and then let him escape, specifically to provoke him into attacking us so you could kill him?” 

Peter smiled a little, “This way you can keep your conscious clear because it will be self-defence.” 

Laura grabbed Peter round the throat and slammed him into the wall. Peter’s smile never faltered, even when Laura flashed the red of her eyes and snarled into his face. 

“Do they know where we live?” she demanded. 

“I’m sure it won’t take them long to find out.” 

“Jesus, Peter! What were you thinking?” 

“You promised we would fight them as a pack, but then you kept hesitating. You keep fretting about whether this one might be innocent, or that one might not deserve it. They’ll come here with their weapons and you’ll see that they all deserve to die.” 

“They’ll come here trying to kill us, you mean?” Laura snarled. “We were planning on ambushing Kate, figuring out how to get her alone so we’d have the advantage. Now they’ll come in armed to the teeth in all their numbers. You put the entire pack at risk!” 

“We’re at risk as long as the hunters are out there, walking freely in our territory. This way, we’ll flush them out. We can get rid of them all in one go.” 

“Unless they kill us all!” 

Whatever else Peter might have said was cut off by Cora said, “Wait! Listen.” 

The argument fell silent. Derek heard what Cora had noticed. In the distance, car engines were approaching. A lot of them. 

They could run. They knew these woods better than the hunters did. They were faster on foot. They could take off into the trees and the hunters wouldn’t be able to follow. But where would they go? Besides, there was no way Peter was going to run. 

Derek turned to Laura, waiting for her instructions, waiting to know how to face this threat. Laura let go of Peter and turned towards the sound of the approaching engines. 

“We stay in the house,” she said. “As soon as we show a claw outside, they’ll start shooting. If we stay inside, they’ll have to come to us. In close combat, they’ll lose the advantage of their weapons. If we can block some of the ways into the house, it will funnel them and they won’t be able to overwhelm us. Start barricading windows.” 

They had minutes. Derek grabbed the kitchen table, upending it with a crash of broken plates, scattering their half-eaten dinner across the floor. He shoved the table up against the kitchen window. The others were already moving through the rest of the house, blocking the windows in Peter’s room with the bookshelves, shoving the couch and coffee table in front of the living room windows. It was all crude, but it didn’t take them long to get something in front of each of the downstairs windows. It wouldn’t hold out against any serious attack, but it should at least slow them down. 

That was all they had time for because by then, the cars were parking at the edge of the clearing. Derek peered out around the edge of the bookshelves in Peter’s room and he could see the hunters moving out into the trees, surrounding the house. 

A man stepped out of the lead car, a crossbow held ready in his hand. Bruising coloured half his face and white bandages extended down below the sleeve of his jacket, but that didn’t make him look any less dangerous. Chris Argent, Derek knew. 

Behind him, a shotgun in hand and a smirk on her face, was the person who made Derek’s blood run cold. Kate Argent looked towards the house and her face split into a grin. She looked excited about what was to come.


	17. Chapter 17

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today's chapter is a little short, but I'm sure you didn't want me to leave you on that cliffhanger any longer. :)

“I think we should talk,” Chris Argent yelled across the clearing. He was still next to his car, looking like he could duck behind it if he needed cover. Not that the group in the house had any ranged weapons to shoot at him with. His comment felt like a taunt and, beside him, Kate was still grinning. Derek gave in to his anger and let his claws grow. 

“Do you usually bring an army with you when you want to talk?” Laura called out from beside the front door. Derek almost wanted to tell her not to answer, not to let them know where she was. What if they shot her through the door with wolfsbane? What if Chris’ words were somehow a trap? 

“Only when the people I’m talking to recently tried to kill me.” 

“No one tried to kill you,” Laura called. Derek could hear the snorts of derision from at least three of the assembled hunters. “I told Peter he was only allowed to kill hunters who tried to kill us and this was the result. You should all just get back in your cars and drive away. I’ll add a no-torture clause in Peter’s instructions and you’ll be fine.” 

“Peter,” Chris called, “is out of control. He’s dangerous. Send him out. Let us deal with him and the rest of you can get on with your lives.” 

“Sure,” Laura said. 

“What?” demanded Derek. He heard his words echoed from Peter and Cora, and in a less angry and more confused tone, from several voices outside. 

Laura continued, “I’ll give you Peter when you hand over your sister and let us execute her for the murder of innocent people. It’s only fair, given that Peter’s the way he is because she set him on fire.” 

“We weren’t responsible for the fire,” Chris called. 

“I don’t know about you or most of your lackeys here, and, unlike some people, we don’t murder someone just because there’s a possibility they’re violent monsters, but your sister was behind the fire. My youngest brother was eight when your sister burned him alive. My cousin Toby was less than a year old. His mom, who was also burned alive, was human, and Toby hadn’t shown any sign of the shift. We don’t know whether this innocent baby was going to grow up to be human or werewolf, but that didn’t stop your sister from killing him.” 

“We don’t kill children. We hunt werewolves who’ve killed people, who are dangerous.” 

“I guess your sister didn’t get the memo,” Laura said. 

“Why are we even listening to this?” Kate asked. “Let’s just get in there already.” 

“What’s the matter, Kate?” Laura asked. “Don’t you want your brother to hear that you enjoy raping and murdering children?” 

“Rape?” Kate actually laughed. Derek heard a scraping noise and realised that his claws were digging through the wood of the window frame. He wasn’t sure which was worse: all those people who would hear what he’d done, or Kate’s derisive laugh. 

There were other voices outside the house, hunters grumbling that they should get on with this, that Laura was stalling, or just offended at the accusations against Kate. This standoff wouldn’t last forever. Sooner or later, one of the hunters would just start shooting or make a run for a window. Laura kept talking like she thought there was a way to argue themselves out of this, but the hunters weren’t going to listen. They weren’t going to change their minds. 

At least Derek could be glad that Stiles was well out of this. He wasn’t exactly safe right now, but at least no one was likely to start shooting at him. Derek would probably never see him again, but Stiles would get the money and resources to fight against the current system. He’d be able to do some good. 

Outside the house, Chris called, “What are you talking about?” 

“I’m talking,” Laura called back, “about a woman in her twenties manipulating a teenage boy into sleeping with her so she could get his clothes and use them to hide her scent, all so she could set fire to a house full of innocent people.” 

Chris turned to his sister, confusion and disbelief all over his face. 

“Come on, Chris,” Kate said. “Surely you’re not listening to a word she’s saying, are you? She’s just making stuff up to stop us taking that rabid dog she’s protecting. She can’t prove anything she’s saying and the police ruled the fire an accident years ago.” 

Derek stood back from the window, mind suddenly racing. He laughed quietly, a sound that tore through his anger at the shock of the idea that had just hit him. He never would have though Kate Argent, of all people, would give him a way to save his pack. 

“Derek, what is it?” Laura asked, voice quiet enough that only those with werewolf hearing would know she’d said anything at all. 

“I have an idea. Keep stalling them.” Derek pulled his phone out and quickly dialled three numbers. 

“Please state the nature of the emergency,” a woman’s voice asked from the other end of the line. 

Derek did his best to channel his current emotions into his voice. There were hunters outside with weapons determined to kill his pack. _Kate_ was out there. It didn’t take any acting to sound scared. 

“There are people outside our house with guns. I think they’re going to kill us.” He spoke to the woman on the phone, while in the background Laura was calling out, suggesting that Chris put his weapon down so that they could talk things through like civilised people. Derek wasn’t sure how much of the background the woman on the phone would be able to pick up, but it was possible she heard some of it.

“What’s your address?” the woman asked, and Derek told her. “How many people are there?” 

“I don’t know. They’re spread out around the house. At least a dozen. We blocked the downstairs windows but they have guns and we don’t have any weapons.” Now that he was letting himself sound scared, his voice trembled slightly. “My sister’s only sixteen.” 

“The police are on their way to your location,” the dispatcher said. “I need to know everything you can tell me about the situation. Has anyone fired a weapon?” 

“No. They’re all waving guns around but no one’s shot at us yet.” 

“Do you know any of the people?” 

“A couple, yeah.” 

“Do you know why they are there?” 

“I’m not sure. I think my uncle got in a fight with one of them early today. Maybe they want revenge or something. They’re threatening to hurt all of us but me and my sisters, we haven’t done anything to them.” Derek wondered if he could make himself cry or if that would be over the top. 

“I need you to stay calm, sir,” the woman said. “Your sister is talking to them?” 

“Yes.” 

In the background, Laura was saying something about no one needing to get hurt and suggesting that Chris and the others just leave. She was presumably playing everything up for the sake of Derek’s phone call. 

“That’s good,” the woman said. “Do everything you can to keep the situation from escalating. The police are on their way to you right now.” 

“How long will they take?” 

“They’ll be there as fast as they can.” 

That was a useless answer. Derek didn’t know if they had to stall for a minute or an hour. They were out in the middle of nowhere, so police response wasn’t going to be instantaneous. It would take time for anyone to get here. He’d probably only been on the phone for two minutes and he wouldn’t be surprised if it took another twenty for the authorities to get here. 

“Keep them talking,” the woman continued. “You want them to see you as people and it will be harder for them to shoot.” 

Derek almost laughed again. The woman couldn’t know that that was the very reason they were in this situation: the people outside didn’t see them as people. He couldn’t say that though, so he just listened to the woman’s steady stream of advice. 

“Don’t make any threats. Don’t panic. Just stay calm and keep them talking and...” 

Whatever else she might have said was cut off by a sudden burst of gunshots. 

Derek swore and dropped the phone. 

“Laura?!” Cora’s voice was a panicked yell. 

“I’m OK,” Laura replied, voice low enough for werewolves to hear but not the hunters outside. Derek pressed his face to the gap beside the bookshelf and looked out. Kate raised her shotgun and fired it towards the house, aiming at the front door. The splintering of wood followed the sound of the blast. 

Another hunter fired his huge rifle in a spray of bullets that shattered windows across the front of the house. Derek dropped down and ducked back from the shower of glass as the window beside him burst into glittering shards. Bullets embedded into the bookshelves but Derek stayed behind the wall to avoid the spray. 

He couldn’t turn to see what was going on without risking a face full of bullets. A chaos of noise assaulted his ears: the roar of gunshots, the shattering glass, yells from the hunters. He couldn’t piece it together to make sense of what was happening or anticipate what would come next. He just crouched by the wall and tried to listen beyond the clamour for sounds of his sisters. He hadn’t heard them crying out in pain, but he couldn’t know if they were alright or not. He couldn’t know anything. 

There was movement up at the window, a face looking through the gap left between the bookshelf and the wall. Derek straightened and extended his fist in one smooth motion, slamming his punch into the face with a sickening crack of bone. The man staggered back, but an instant later there was a gun where the face had been. 

Derek grabbed the gun, feeling the heat of its recent firing, and twisted. He yanked so that the muzzle wasn’t aimed at him, even as it sent out a new burst of bullets. He wasn’t quite fast enough and one bullet grazed his side with a line of hot pain, but he didn’t let that affect him, barely registering it. He kept moving, twisting the gun out of the hunter’s hands and throwing it backwards. 

Something else fell through the window but Derek’s attention was on the handgun the hunter was drawing. Derek couldn’t reach out and grab that without exposing himself to the other hunters outside. 

His racing thoughts were still trying to think of a plan to deal with the handgun when the thing at his feet exploded. 

Light stabbed into his eyes as pain tore up his legs. His ringing ears and pounding head left him dazed. 

He lay on the floor, his thoughts strangely sluggish, and tried to reorient himself. He didn’t even remember falling. 

His eyes showed him a world that was blurred, obscured by the afterimages of the explosion. He saw a shadow above him but couldn’t even process whether it was friend or foe before another shadow blurred into view, slamming into the first and knocking it to the ground in a snarling heap of limbs. 

Derek blinked, shaking his head to clear it, and blinked again. Peter was sitting astride a young hunter. Peter grabbed the human’s head and twisted with a sharp snap of bone. When he let go, the hunter’s head fell back to the floor with a soft thump that was barely audible over the sounds of fighting around them. Empty eyes stared in Derek’s direction but didn’t see anything. 

Derek wanted to throw up. He couldn’t tell if it was some side-effect of the explosion or from seeing his uncle kill the man who’d been trying to kill him. He pushed himself up and took in the room. The bookshelf barricade was gone, pages of damaged books fluttering in the wind through the shattered window. They were completely exposed. 

Kate stepped up to the window, rising like a spectre from Derek’s nightmares. 

She raised her shotgun to aim at Derek’s head, still grinning. 

“Did you really think you were going to get away with this?” she asked. “I should have just slit your throat when you were passed out in my bed.” 

Peter snarled, but the sound of it wasn’t enough to hide the sound of another voice from outside the house. 

“Kate?” Chris asked. “What are you saying? Were they telling the truth?” 

For a second, Kate’s attention wavered. Her grin faltered. She glanced to one side. 

In that instant, Peter leapt through the window. Derek pushed himself onto shaky legs so he could see what was going on, but by the time he managed to stand, Kate was already dead. A huge shard of broken glass was sticking up through her throat. Peter had shoved her down onto it. It was hard for Derek to see the hunters or Chris or even Peter. All he could see was that chunk of glass and the blood gushing out around it. She was gone. She was dead. 

Derek was vaguely aware of Chris aiming his gun at Peter, of Peter’s low growl, of other shouts and crashes and sounds of violence from the rest of the house. 

Then a sound cut across the chaos, a commanding voice blasting through the din, electronically magnified. 

“Police! Freeze!”


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I meant to post this chapter earlier in the week, but that pesky real life kept getting in the way.

“Sir, I need you to sit still,” the deputy was saying. “My partner is going to call an ambulance.” 

“No ambulance,” Derek said. He could already feel his injuries starting to heal. He could hold them back by conscious will, clinging to the pain and forcing his powers to slow, but he couldn’t keep it up forever. If they took him to a hospital, it wouldn’t take long for someone to figure out something was very wrong. 

“Sir,” the deputy continued, “you’re full of adrenaline right now which is holding back some of the pain, but you’ve been injured. You need to get that taken care of.” 

Derek was sitting on the grenade-scorched carpet of Peter’s room, surrounded by shards of broken glass, some of them red with his blood. The soaked shirt on his side showed where the bullet had grazed him. It was no wonder the deputy was convinced he needed medical professionals and Derek fought for an excuse that would be accepted. His eyes fell on the wreckage of the small pile of Stiles’ belongings that had been left here for safekeeping. Derek had an answer that he never would have thought of before he’d got to know Stiles. 

“We don’t have insurance,” Derek said. “If you call an ambulance, I could end up in the debtor’s program. Seriously, these are minor. I’ll be fine.” 

The deputy looked like he wanted to argue some more, but he nodded. He stood up and signalled through the broken window, presumably to his partner, “Hold off on the ambulance.” 

Derek got to his feet, more to prove that he wasn’t horrendously injured than anything else. He looked out at the scene outside. There were several deputies now, one of whom was arguing with Laura about whether or not it was necessary to arrest Peter and take him to the station along with the hunters. The first of the deputies had arrived just in time to see Peter throw himself at Kate and now they could see the obvious result. Laura was complaining about self-defence, and how Peter had just meant to disarm her. It wasn’t his fault that there was broken glass all over the place. Derek tried to listen in on the argument but, judging by the reaction of the deputy who was still beside him, that probably just made him look dazed and out of focus. 

“Sir,” said the deputy beside Derek, “I really think you should sit.” 

“I’m fine,” Derek insisted. “I need to...” He gestured vaguely towards Laura and started limping out of the house. Cora was there, staring down at Kate’s body. There were a few narrow lines of blood of her arms but otherwise no sign of injury. At least no one was trying to get her checked out by a medical professional because Derek suspected the scratches had already healed. 

“You OK?” Derek asked her. She nodded and then leaned in for a tentative hug. Derek didn’t squeeze to hard, aware of his unhealed injuries, but he breathed in her scent, felt her warmth against his skin, and reminded himself that she was alive. She was safe. They’d got through this without losing any more of the pack. 

Close by, it seemed Laura won her argument. Peter wouldn’t be taken into custody, but they would all need to go down to the station to give their statements, and Peter would need to stay nearby in case the sheriff’s department had further questions. He had, after all, just killed someone and he wasn’t even pretending to look distraught about it. 

A police van started up and drove away from the house, taking its cargo of hunters with it. Deputies were photographing bullet holes and broken glass. Someone was inspecting Kate Argent’s corpse. There was so much going on that it was hard for Derek to follow. He wondered if he was still dazed from the explosion and there was a throbbing pain behind his eyes. He’d bashed his head pretty badly and he was holding back his healing. He wondered what concussion felt like. He’d have to ask Stiles sometime. 

“Are you OK?” Cora asked. 

Derek shrugged. “I will be.” 

It was a long night. They rescued some clean clothes and personal items from the house, taking what they would need for a few days away from home. The house itself was a crime scene and would be photographed and documented thoroughly before they could be allowed to live here again. Derek grabbed Stiles’ bag as well, just in case, and then they all piled into Laura’s car. 

“We need to work out our story,” she said, as she started driving, following one of the sheriff department cruisers that was taking the last couple of hunters down to the station. “It was a good idea, Derek, and I doubt we’d all be alive if you hadn’t call them, but these guys aren’t going to be satisfied until they have a motive for this attack.” 

This was why they generally didn’t involve authorities in their conflicts with the hunters. They couldn’t easily explain why the Argents would want them dead without revealing their secrets. 

“I’m the motive,” Derek said. 

“What?” Laura asked. 

“We tell them about Kate and me, that she slept with me. We say that when I threatened to tell anyone about our relationship, she burned our family alive. I kept it a secret because I blamed myself but I recently admitted it. We say that Peter confronted Chris Argent about it and they got in a fight and that Chris took offense at the accusations. He rounded up his hunter buddies to get revenge for our attempts to sully Kate’s reputation, and things got out of hand.” 

It was close enough to the truth that they’d be able to remember it. They didn’t have evidence for most of this, but the fact that the hunters had been caught in the act should be enough. The hunters wouldn’t want this to go to trial any more than they did. Hopefully they’d take whatever deals they could get and this could blow over quickly. 

“Are you sure you want to admit to what happened with Kate?” Laura asked. 

“It’s the only way to explain everything,” Derek said. 

They discussed the details a little more: who knew what and who would say what. Peter would admit to a drunken fight with Chris. 

“Drunken?” he asked. 

“So you can be vague about any injuries you might have caused him,” Laura said. “Unless you want to admit that you tortured him in order to orchestrate this whole mess?” 

Peter considered this for a few seconds before saying, “No, I’ll go with the drunk excuse.” 

By the time they reached the sheriff’s station in Beacon Hills, they had their plan worked out. Derek was still nervous. Most of their story would be the truth, but they were still technically lying to the authorities. He didn’t want to think about the consequences if they were caught in the lie, or if the sheriff figured out the real motive behind the violence. 

Inside the station, everything was chaotically busy, with deputies rushing around to process the prisoners and sort out paperwork. The Hales were left sitting in a waiting area for twenty minutes, which just made Derek even more nervous. He wanted to get this over and done with. He wanted to say that his side of the story didn’t matter because the hunters had tried to kill them. He wanted to go home, even though he knew his home was currently off-limits. Laura put an arm round him and they sat in silence through the frustrating wait. 

They couldn’t even use this time for useful planning because they were surrounded by law enforcement officers. If anyone heard them trying to get their stories straight, it would destroy their whole scheme. 

Derek wondered if they ought to call a lawyer. It would probably be sensible, but none of them were being arrested for anything, not even Peter. If they called a lawyer, would it make them look suspicious? Would it make them look like they were feeling guilty? They had more things to hide than most which was both a point in favour of calling a lawyer and a point in favour of doing everything they possibly could to appear innocent. The longer he had to wait, the more Derek was second-guessing his second-guessing on the subject. 

Eventually, a deputy arrived and asked who wanted to go first. They had to give their statements separately to make sure they were independent. Laura volunteered and the deputy took her deeper into the station to an interview room. Sitting in the waiting area, Derek closed his eyes and focused his hearing, listening beneath the bustle and chatter to find Laura’s voice. If he could listen in on her questioning, he could make sure his story really did line up with hers. 

When asked what had caused the fight, Laura answered, “It’s all really complicated and I don’t have any evidence for most of the background stuff that led up to this.” 

“Just start from the beginning,” the deputy said. “Tell us what you can and let us worry about the evidence.” 

“OK. The beginning. Well, when my brother was sixteen, he was raped by Kate Argent. She would have been twenty-two, twenty-three, something like that. I didn’t know anything about it at the time but she manipulated him into a sexual relationship. When he tried to get out of the relationship, she threatened our family. Derek told her he was going to tell the truth about her and... and she burned our house down with most of our family inside.” 

“This was the fire six years ago?” 

“Yeah.” 

“Did you tell any of this to the police at the time?” 

“I didn’t know at the time. I didn’t find out about Kate until recently. We thought the fire had been deliberate and we told the police that but all the reports came back inconclusive and we had to let it go.” 

“Did your brother tell the police?” 

“No.” 

“Why not?” 

“Maybe because he’d just seen most of his family murdered when he threatened to tell about Kate. He was scared and he blamed himself because Kate had started the fire over him.” 

“So this wasn’t revealed to the police at the time of the fire?” 

“No.” 

“But you now believe that Kate Argent raped your brother and set fire to your family home?” 

“Yes.” 

“Why didn’t you come to the police when you found out?” 

“What good would it do? The fire was years ago. The only evidence I have is my brother’s word. I believe him but it’s not like it would convince a jury beyond reasonable doubt and he’s been through enough. It’s not like I wanted Kate to get away with it but I knew there wouldn’t be enough for an arrest.” 

The deputy continued, “You believe all these events around the fire led to the fight tonight?” 

“Yeah. My uncle, he said he got into a fight with Chris Argent, Kate’s brother. I don’t know the details but Peter said he told Chris about Kate and things got ugly. The next thing I know, Chris and Kate were at our house with a load of friends and guns, calling us liars, calling Uncle Peter a violent monster, threatening to shoot us.” 

An elbow jabbed into Derek’s side. Derek jerked up, opening his eyes and looked at Cora. She’d been the one to elbow. She jerked her head to indicate the young-looking deputy standing in front of Derek, looking at him with concern. It wasn’t the same who’d been talking about an ambulance back at the house, but the expression on his face was almost identical. 

“Sorry,” said Derek, “what?” 

“I asked if you were OK,” the deputy said. “Do you need a doctor?” 

“I’m fine. It’s just been a long night.” 

“Are you still up for giving your statement?” 

“Yeah. Let’s get this over with.” 

Derek followed the deputy into another interview room. It was right next to the one in which Laura was still being questioned. It would be much easier to listen to her here, but if he tried to listen to her answers while giving his own, he would just look distracted and out of it. It would be even harder to convince these people that he didn’t need medical assistance. 

“I’m Deputy Parrish,” the young man said once they were both seated. “I need to ask you some questions about what happened today. Do you understand?” 

“Yeah.” 

“OK. Can you describe what happened?” 

He needed to keep the details of his story the same as Laura’s but it would be suspicious if they were completely identical, so he decided to start his story at a later point. He could go back and fill in the Kate details later. 

“We were having dinner,” Derek said. “We heard a load of cars driving up which was weird. We don’t usually get surprise visitors. I went to look and there were all these guys getting out with guns. One of them, Chris Argent, he started yelling that Peter was a liar and that he should come out and take back what he’d said. It was... We were scared. Laura told us to start barricading the windows in case... well, in case they started shooting.” 

“Did they?” Parrish asked. 

“Not right away. Laura tried to get them calmed down while I called the police. It didn’t really work.” 

Derek, with a little prompting, went on to describe his memories of the fight, playing down his injuries. He attributed his dazed actions after the explosions to the short-term effects of a stun grenade rather than anything that required medical intervention. Once he’d reached the end of the story and the arrival of the cops, Parrish prompted Derek to go back over the story, picking up on details. 

“You said that Chris Argent called your uncle a liar? Do you know what that was about?” 

Derek had known he would have to talk about Kate. Their whole story hinged on her. Still, now that it came down to it, he really didn’t want to put it in words, especially words that would be written down and kept as a record, maybe brought up again in a trial. 

“Is it... is this really necessary?” he asked. 

“If it’s what motivated this attack, we need to know. What was that argument about?” 

Derek braced himself. He clenched his hands into fists beneath the table, holding back the surge of emotion that threatened to bring the shift with it. 

“Uncle Peter told Chris Argent that his sister raped me.” 

“Did she?” Parrish asked. 

Derek swallowed again. Why the hell had he told them to go with this story? Why couldn’t he have thought of some other excuse to explain the attack? Every word that left his mouth felt like a lead weight that had to be dragged up his throat with enormous effort. 

“I don’t know,” Derek said. “Laura calls it rape but I agreed to it at the time. I enjoyed it. It didn’t feel like rape when it happened.” 

“When was this?” 

“I was sixteen. Kate and I were in a sexual relationship.” Then, because he wasn’t sure if it would be in Parrish’s notes, he said, “She was twenty-three.” 

From the way Parrish reacted, her age hadn’t been in his notes. He looked at Derek in shock, an expression of disgust briefly showing on his face. Even when his features returned to their look of calm patience, Derek could smell the traces of anger in the young deputy’s scent. 

“If this happened when you were sixteen, why did it take so long for things to come to a head?” Parrish asked. 

“I didn’t tell anyone. It was only a few days ago that I told my family. Laura and Peter were arguing about the fire. He blamed her for the way his medical treatment was handled and he was upset with her. I told them that I was the one they should be upset with. That the fire was my fault.” 

Parrish couldn’t conceal his shock this time either. 

“Are you saying that you burned down your home?” 

Derek shook his head, “No. Kate did. When I said I was going to tell my parents about us, she got angry. She told me I couldn’t tell anyone and then... I know she was the one who set the fire but I didn’t have any proof. It wouldn’t do any good to tell anyone and... and I was scared. If she did it once, who was to say she wouldn’t do it again?” 

“You thought she might kill your sisters?” 

Derek nodded. 

Parrish continued his questioning, prompting with gentle nudges to fill in a few details, but he did it all in a kind way. Derek ought to feel grateful, but this soft approach just made him angrier. Parrish was treating him like he was some fragile, broken thing, something that might shatter if pushed too hard. It made Derek want to scream. 

The frustration at the situation, at Parrish’s over-cautious approach, at the pain of the injuries he was trying to keep from healing, it all added up. Derek wanted this to be done with. But still the questions came. 

It felt like he’d been in that interview room for hours when Parrish had enough. They would type up an official statement for Derek to sign and then he would be allowed to go leave. Parrish made the mistake of saying, ‘go home,’ but Derek knew he couldn’t go home. Hunters had destroyed his home. Again. 

He went back to the waiting area. Laura was there, her interview finished a while ago. She wrapped her arms around Derek. He stood there, feeling the hug but unable to take any comfort from it. Everything that was happening right now, the stress of tonight, the damage to their home, it all came back to him. All of this could be traced back to his stupid decision six years ago to trust Kate Argent. 

They had to wait another hour before Peter was finally released. They were all advised that the police might have further questions for them, but the recording of Derek’s 911 call supported their story. Derek had listened through the wall to the sound of the recording being played back. His phone had stayed connected after he’d dropped it. Most of the fight was unintelligible because of background noise, but the recording still managed to catch the sound of Kate’s final words as she admitted to wishing she’d killed him when he was in her bed. It wasn’t quite a confession of rape, but it was enough that the sheriff and the deputies were all inclined to believe the Hales’ side of things. 

As they walked out of the station into the cold night, Derek thought they might actually get away with it.


	19. Chapter 19

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have no idea how the adoption process usually goes, but I assume it involves lots of paperwork and background checks. At least, I can claim that's how it works in this world.

Derek could have done with several hours more sleep but that wasn’t going to happen. The floor was cold and hard beneath him, the sunlight too bright as it shone through windows that were too large and devoid of curtains. He opened his eyes and stared up at the cracked paint of the ceiling, memories of where he was and how he’d come to be here flowing back. 

There was a low noise and Derek turned. A large, industrial-style door was sliding opening. Laura walked in and slid the door shut again. She held a tray of coffee cups and a paper bag that smelled of something sweet. She saw that Derek was awake and gave him a smile. 

“I got pastries,” she said. “I don’t trust that thing not to explode.” She jabbed a finger towards the oven that the previous occupants had left behind. “And there’s no hot water.” 

Derek stood and went to grab one of the offered pastries. By the time they had come out of the sheriff’s station last night, it had been late and none of them had wanted to hunt around for a hotel that still had vacancies. Given that they now owned multiple properties, it seemed sensible to make use of one of them. Derek knew that this place needed a lot of work to be ready for renting out, but he still resented Laura’s tone. Maybe it was just grumpiness from lack of sleep. 

“We have a roof over our heads,” he pointed out. 

“And a giant hole in the wall,” Laura nodded towards it. The hole was large enough for a person to walk through, and in fact they had done. Cora and Peter had set up camp in the room on the other side of that wall. The entire top floor of this building had once been split into two, large loft apartments, and now that hole made them into one. 

“It’s not an external wall,” Derek said. 

“If you think this place is fit to live it,” Laura said, “I dread to think where you’d end up without me to look after you. You’d wind up living like a hobo in a train car without me.” 

The grumpiness washed away in a wave of gladness that his sister was there. Only a day ago, he’d come close to losing her. The realisation that she could have died hit him again and he went in for a hug, the movement nearly making her spill her coffee over him. 

“Hey,” she said, softly. The arm not holding coffee pulled him close. “It’s OK. We’re OK.” 

Derek could have easily broken down crying in her arms, except that Peter wandered through the hole, drawn by the scent of coffee. Peter might be pack, but Derek didn’t want to cry in front of him. He pulled away from Laura. 

“I knew we’d have to put work into this place,” he said, “so we can rent it out. I can just get moving on it a bit quicker. I’ll look up plumbers who can have a go at sorting the hot water. I’ll get someone check the wiring as well. The rest of the stuff, we can sort out as we go along.” 

“We could still get a hotel,” Laura said. Derek shook his head. Hotels felt like someone else’s territory. This place, for all its faults, could be made to feel like a pack space. Already, their scents were layering on top of the smells of dust and decay. Before long, this place would feel like it was theirs. After everything with the hunters, he needed to be in a place that felt like their pack. He wasn’t sure how to put this in words, but when he met Laura’s gaze, he saw that she already understood. 

“Alright,” she said. “But get someone to check out the gas as well. I don’t want this place blowing up around us.” 

“And get beds!” Cora called from the other side of the hole. 

“And we’re going to need appliances,” Laura agreed. She got out her phone and started typing notes on it. While she worked, Derek devoured one of the pastries. Cora came to join them, zeroing in on the coffee. 

“Right,” Laura said, “I still have work.” She’d kept her job, despite the influx of money, though none of them were sure how much longer than would last. “Cora, I’ll drop you off at school on the way. Derek, your priority is to get this place safety checked. After that, getting hot water and a working oven is a bonus. Peter, you can sort out the beds and see if...” 

“I have other things to do today,” Peter said. 

The rest of them turned to look at him. Derek felt a rising surge of anxiety. 

“What things?” Laura asked. 

“Things more important than shopping for beds.” 

“The last time we let you out of our sight, you tortured a man and triggered a fight that nearly cost us our lives. I’m not letting you leave here until you give me a straight answer. What things?” Laura glared at Peter. She wasn’t showing the red of her eyes, but her expression was no less fierce for it. 

Peter rolled his eyes as though this was all silly posturing, but he did answer. 

“Adoption papers,” he said. 

“What are you on about?” Derek asked. 

Peter shot him a withering gaze, “Stiles is sixteen. When you rescue him from his indentured status, the authorities will no doubt decide that he belongs in the foster care system. If we want to keep him, we need paperwork.” 

Derek looked to Laura. From the expression on her face, she hadn’t considered this either. 

“You’re going to adopt Stiles?” Laura said. “Did you actually ask him about this?” 

“I told him I’d take care of him.” 

“Yeah, but you were rather out of it when you were having those conversations and he might have been distracted by you trying to kill us. Did you actually sit down with Stiles and explain your plan to adopt him?” From Peter’s expression, the answer was no. 

“The process will take time,” Derek said. “There will be checks and beurocracy and the people in charge will probably need to make sure we’re capable of looking after him. Peter can start off the process and we can discuss it with Stiles when he gets back.” 

Laura considered this for a moment, and then nodded, “And in the meantime, let’s get hot water working and make this place look at least semi-habitable in case social services come looking. I guess this means beds are on your to-do list, Derek. Peter, if you finish up with the adoption stuff, you can buy groceries. And please promise me you won’t go an torture anyone.” 

“Most of the hunters are still locked up,” Peter said, in a tone that suggested he was annoyed about this. 

“That’s not a promise.” 

“Fine. I promise I won’t torture anyone today.” 

Laura looked as though she might press him for something a bit more long-term, but she obviously decided better of it. 

“Are we sure all the hunters are locked up though?” Cora asked. “They’re not going to try and attack us today, are they?” 

“I very much doubt anything will happen today,” Laura said. “Most of the hunters will still be locked up and any from out of town won’t have had time to get here. But there’s bound to be trouble over Kate’s death. So keep your eyes open and I will expect constant contact through the day.” 

The others went off to complete their jobs for the day and Derek used his phone to look up various plumbers and engineers who could come on short notice to look at the apartment building. By the time the first of them opened for the day, he had a list of phone numbers to call. Having ridiculous amounts of money made the whole thing considerably easier than it would have been a couple of weeks ago, and he had little difficulty in getting people to agree to come out right away. 

By ten in the morning, he had three different people working in various parts of the building. The priority was to get everything safe and running for the loft, but Derek gave them all instructions about moving on to the rest of the building when they were done. He left them to it, not caring that there were strangers walking around the building because it wasn’t like they had anything to steal. 

He did consider the possibility that these people might be working for the hunters, but he dismissed the idea quickly. The hunters would have had no idea the Hales would need these services and most of them were locked up. Even if they had wanted to infiltrate an electrician’s organisation to set anti-werewolf traps, they wouldn’t have had time and would have no way of knowing which company Derek would call first. Getting people to work on ridiculously short notice would work in their favour because hunters wouldn’t be able to guess which companies Derek would be letting in the door. Besides, most hunters tended to be more direct. 

Derek went on to his next task, which involved a trip to a furniture shop. He’d done some browsing on his phone while he waited for the workmen to arrive, and he’d chosen a fairly large, independently owned shop whose website declared that they were a living wage employer. He walked in and went up to the first person he could find wearing the shop’s uniform. The salesman was probably a year or two younger than Derek, but he kept calling Derek sir and couldn’t be persuaded otherwise, especially when he found out how much Derek planned on buying from them. 

He’d decided to get more than just the furniture for the loft. Very soon, they would be rescuing people from the debtors’ program and a lot of them would have nowhere to live, so Derek decided to go ahead and just order a bunch of beds. He could buy most of the furnishings for the apartments later, but no one wanted to sleep on the floor. 

“Do you want to take a look at our range?” the salesman asked. 

“Just tell me what you’ve got in stock that you can deliver today,” Derek said. And so they ended up sitting at a computer, while the salesman went through his list of inventory. The shop kept only two or three models of each item in stock at any given time, so Derek ended up ordering a mixture of sizes and types, enough to provide at least two beds for each of the apartments in the building, as well as giving beds for the Hales and Stiles. At least Stiles wouldn’t have to sleep on camp bed anymore. 

“Do you want to try any of them out?” the salesman asked. 

“I’ll see which one I want to be mine when they arrive. Now show me couches.” 

Most things could come after they decorated, but he wanted a few items for the loft apartment: couch, table, something for storage. A few tables and chairs for the rest of the building would probably be useful as well, even though it would be better to wait until painting and carpeting were dealt with. He and the salesman were still working their way through Derek’s list, which included the key furniture for the loft and a handful of items that might be needed in the rest of the building, when the shop’s owner came over. 

“This seems to be taking a while,” he said, smiling at Derek. “Is there anything I can do to speed things up?” 

“No,” Derek said. “We’re nearly there.” 

The owner looked at the computer screen. 

“Fifty seven beds?” he asked. 

“Oh, that’s a point,” said Derek. “Do you guys sell bedsheets and pillows and stuff?” 

The owner looked at Derek, then back at the screen. There was a running total and the bottom of the list of items to be ordered. Derek could practically see the dollar signs behind the man’s eyes. 

“I’m sure we could source some for you, sir,” the owner said. 

When they were finally done and payment went through, the salesman was grinning from ear to ear. 

“Do you get paid on commission?” Derek asked. 

“Yes, sir, and you...” The man trailed off. Apparently the thought of today’s commission had just killed his ability to speak. Derek returned the smile and then left the shop. He called one of the workmen to check whether the gas was going to be working and then went off in search of an oven. 

***

A few hours later, Derek was cooking dinner on an oven that wasn’t going to explode. A short distance away, Peter sat on the new couch, working his way through a stack of forms. He was filling them out on behalf of Laura, rather than himself. Derek had persuaded him to do it this way, since Laura was the one with a steady job and listing Peter’s incoming as ‘a pile of mysterious bearer bonds from a secret vault’ was unlikely to go down well. Plus, Laura was Cora’s legal guardian, so she had a track record of adoptive parenthood that Peter didn’t have. 

Derek had another reason to want Laura to be Stiles’ guardian. Peter obviously cared more about Stiles than any of the rest of them, and Derek still had doubts about Peter’s intentions towards Laura. If Laura was the legal guardian of Stiles, then Peter would have to refrain from murdering her if he wanted Stiles to stay with them. That would buy them until Stiles turned eighteen at least to find another way of persuading Peter not to kill Laura. 

They were both working on their respective tasks when there came a knock at the sliding door to the loft. Derek expected it to be one of the workmen, who were still testing the safety of everything in the other apartments, fixing or replacing anything that was broken or dangerous. However, when Derek slid open the door, it was the young officer who’d interviewed him at the sheriff’s station. Parrish, Derek remembered. 

“Do you mind if I come in?” Parrish asked. “I have a few questions about your statements last night.” 

“Sure,” Derek said. “Is it OK if I carry on?” He gestured towards the stove. 

“Go ahead.” 

So Derek returned to his half-prepared meal. Peter watched the deputy suspiciously from the couch but said nothing. 

“You’re living here for the time being?” Parrish asked, looking around at the loft. 

“Yeah. I know it doesn’t look like much, but if we can’t use the house...” Derek shrugged. He stirred the contents of his pot. 

“I was just curious, because I looked into the records and saw you bought this place recently. You bought a lot of property recently. Yet, when one of my colleagues tried to call you an ambulance, you said you were worried about the cost.” 

Derek could have cursed himself for his stupidity. It was a lie so easily caught out. Why the hell hadn’t he thought of something better? Could he claim that the head injury had dazed him enough that he’d forgotten they now had money? He prodded the pot, hoping the activity would buy time, but his mind remained hopelessly blank. 

“In this family,” Peter said from the couch, “we’ve all spent too much time in hospital rooms. You don’t have to be shy, Derek, about admitting that you don’t like doctors.” 

And there it was, an excuse handed to him on a silver platter by his uncle of all people. Derek turned to face Parrish. 

“Ever since the fire,” he said, “hospitals freak me out. I knew my injuries weren’t serious but the other deputy didn’t listen when I said I didn’t want to go, so I made up that stuff about money. I didn’t think that it would go in my official statement. Am I in trouble?” 

“Not for that. But you should have told the truth.” 

“I know. I’m sorry. But as Peter said, we’ve all spent too much time in hospitals. He’s only been well enough to leave a care facility for a few months.” If Parrish had looked into financial records, he would probably have looked into Peter’s medical records. Hopefully though, he would assume that Peter had been much closer to recovery on leaving that facility than he really had been, otherwise the miraculously fast healing would be difficult to explain. 

Parrish nodded, apparently accepting the answer, but when he spoke again his tone was harder, and there was a trace of anger in his scent. 

“When you left that facility, Mr Hale,” he said to Peter, “I understand you needed assistance at home?” 

“For a little while, yes,” Peter said. “My condition was improving so that I didn’t need medical professionals, but there were tasks that were hard for me to do by myself.” 

All perfectly rational and without the use of the word ‘coma’. Hopefully that would be enough. 

“And when you no longer needed help,” Parrish said, “you dumped Stiles back into the system. You would rather buy apartment blocks and offices than help a kid like Stiles out of debt.” 

Now Derek understood the anger. It had nothing to do with the attack the day before. Maybe nothing about this visit had really been about that. This man was a deputy and must have worked with Stiles’ father before his death. 

“You think we should have taken responsibility for Stiles’ debts?” Peter asked, getting to his feet. “Paid them all off for him?” 

Parrish hesitated a moment, “Maybe not all of them. But the rest of us are doing what we can for him. You can afford to buy up buildings all round the city but you can’t even pay to keep him working for you and out of the sweatshops?” 

Peter stood in front of Parrish now and held out the papers in his hand, the forms he’d been filling out when Parrish had walked in. 

“You care about Stiles,” Peter said. “You think someone needs to look out for him. Shoulder some of the burden Stiles has been lifting on his own.” 

Parrish looked down. His eyes widened as he read the headers on the forms. 

“Adoption papers? You’re planning on adopting Stiles?” 

“Hoping to,” said Peter. “If we do, then his debts become our responsibility. No one will be able to send him back into system. Of course, the paperwork will take a while to go through and we need references who’ll say that we’re suitable for taking care of Stiles.” Peter flipped through to the relevant part of the form. “I’m sure having an officer of the law vouch for us would speed things up considerably.” 

Parrish looked between Peter and Derek. Derek kept his mouth shut. Parrish didn’t need to know that they planned on getting Stiles out of the system before this paperwork even became relevant. His anger had vanished now. A determined joy filled his face and he reached out to take the pen from Peter. 

Peter’s smile was full of victory as the deputy wrote his details down as a reference for the Hales’ ability to be suitable guardians for Stiles.


	20. Chapter 20

Derek drove to the administration building of the debtors’ program the instant he sent the payment to Stiles’ account. He then sat in the car park for three hours waiting for something to happen. He had no idea how long the bureaucracy would take. First the banks had to process the payment, then the fact Stiles had a surplus would trigger an alert, and that would kick off the procedure for releasing Stiles. Derek just hoped the alerts were regular. If they only checked the system once every twenty-four hours, Stiles could spend today waiting for a release and terrified that something had gone wrong. 

What if something had gone wrong? What if someone had stolen the payment somehow? What if Stiles was hurt? What if the people in charge tried to change the rules to stop Stiles getting free? 

Derek sat in his car, unable to distract himself with book or phone or anything, because every time he tried to think of something else, his thoughts returned to Stiles. Where was Stiles? 

Time crept by impossibly slowly. Derek listened to the sounds inside the building. There were people in there, talking. If he strained, he could make out muffled voices, snatches of conversation. He could only get fragments, the walls of the building blocking anything that would make it coherent. He caught moments of discussions about TV programs, complaints about meetings, comments on paperwork. The pieces came and went without Derek being able to follow any single thread long enough to learn anything meaningful from it. 

Minutes passed. Derek stood and paced around the car for a bit, striding across the parking lot and back again, measuring time in steps. After a bit, a guy in a security guard’s uniform came over and asked if everything was alright. 

“I’m expecting a friend to get released today,” Derek said. 

“You’ve been waiting here a while.” 

“Yeah. I’m not sure how long it will take.” 

“Perhaps you’d better come inside. You can ask about your friend’s status.” 

The man probably wanted to verify Derek’s story, but Derek followed because finding out Stiles’ status would be good. He’d stayed out of the way in case his presence alerted anyone to the fact that there was a bigger plan happening, but waiting in the parking lot was driving him crazy. He needed to know what was happening. Inside the reception area, the security guard went up to the front desk and asked for release tracking information. 

“The name of the debtor?” the receptionist asked. The security guard looked pointedly at Derek. 

“Stilinski.” He spelled it out for her and hoped she didn’t ask for a first name. 

“Ah, got it,” the receptionist said. The security guard looked mildly surprised; he hadn’t expected Derek to have been telling the truth. “It says here he’s in transit. He should get here any minute.” 

Derek let out a breath. Stiles was on his way. He was going to be released. Things were going according to plan. 

“How long will it take when he gets here?” Derek asked. 

“Oh, no more than a couple of hours,” the receptionist said, as though this was incredibly fast. “There’s some paperwork, a few final processing fees, things like that.” 

Processing fees. Someone could pay off their debt and they’d still be expected to pay processing fees. Someone who’d barely scraped their way into credit could end up right back in debt again right when they thought they were getting out. Derek wished he could burn this place to the ground. 

“You can wait here, sir,” the security guard said, gesturing to the seats nearby. It wasn’t a request. Derek sat. The guard gave him a suspicious look and then walked out. Derek sat and listened. He could hear better now, but it was still made up of snatches of conversation that clashed and overlapped. He let the noise wash over him until a familiar voice caught his attention. It was Grennich, the man who’d performed the assessment on Stiles. 

“They always cry rape,” Grennich was saying. “They think it will win them sympathy or get their lazy asses out of work.” Derek nearly stopped breathing. What if he was talking about Stiles? 

“Just cite her for prostitution,” Grennich said. “Slap her with the fine and the bitch will learn to keep her mouth shut. No need for anything she said to go into the official report. Who’s she going to complain to?” 

Not Stiles then. He’d said she. The intense wave of relief was followed instantly by a deep sense of guilt. Stiles hadn’t been the one raped and getting punished for speaking out, but someone else was. From the sound of it, Grennich was telling a colleague not to report a crime, to wilfully ignore mistreatment of someone trapped in the program. Derek wasn’t surprised, but he still burned with fury. Always, Grennich had said, like this was something that happened over and over again. 

There was a tearing noise and he looked down. His hands clutched the edge of his seat and his claws had torn through the fabric. He forced himself to calm down. He closed his eyes and willed his claws back into fingers. 

Derek tried to focus on something else, to listen to anyone other than Grennich in the hope it would keep him from shifting right here in this very public place. He tried listening to a woman talking about her sister’s wedding, a conversation that was dull enough to be calming given that Derek didn’t know any of the people involved, but his ears kept noting another voice, pleading, that stood out against the others. Somewhere in this building, a woman was pleading that she had a child, that her credit cards had been stolen, that she’d never made the payments. She insisted over and over that she shouldn’t be here, that she’d called the back and challenged the charges, that her bank would sort everything out. She always paid her bills on time, she insisted. 

From the increasing desperation in her tone, no one was listening to her. 

Derek wanted to break down the doors into the building and let that woman out, but he knew that wouldn’t help. Not in the long term. He looked across at the receptionist. 

Feigning an air of boredom, Derek asked, “You can look up debtors’ records?” 

“Only basic status information,” the receptionist answered. “I can’t get into personal details.” 

“Can you get access to their account codes?” 

“Why?” 

Derek shrugged. He pretended unconcern. 

“All that financial stuff must be stored somewhere: who owes how much and all that,” Derek said. 

“I guess. I don’t have access to the financial systems.” 

“How would someone get access to that?” 

“Why?” the receptionist asked again. 

“Just curious. I wonder how many people end up in debt, how big those debts are.” He gave another shrug. “Not much else to think about here.” 

“I don’t know,” the receptionist said. “I guess the intake managers would have that information but they’re probably not allowed to share it. The finance teams too, I guess.” 

Derek wondered if he could point Peter at someone in the finance teams and get him to frighten some account codes out of them. All their plans required access to those account codes. Everything Stiles was going through were to get hold of them. Derek had managed to acquire two dozen codes by going round stores that hired indentured workers, but they couldn’t get to those people working in factories without someone going inside, and there was no way Derek was letting Stiles do this again. 

As if summoned by the thought of him, Derek caught the sound of Stiles’ voice. It was faint, muffled by the walls between them, but it was unmistakable. 

“Yeah, yeah,” Stiles complained, “I can walk on my own thanks. No need to prod.” 

“Shut up unless you want citing for insubordination,” someone said. 

“You really think that’s going to scare me now?” Stiles asked. 

“It should. It would be a shame if a fine knocked you back into the red when you got so close to getting out. Then we’d have to charge you the transportation fees as well.” 

Stiles clearly wasn’t scared by this threat. He knew how much money Derek had planned to pay into the account; there was no way a fine would throw him back into debt. Presumably the man bringing him in didn’t know that. 

“Are you OK?” the receptionist was looking at Derek with concern. He snapped his attention back to her. 

“I’m fine. My mind was just wandering.” 

Stiles was here. He was alive and complaining, which meant he was OK. At least that was what Derek tried to tell himself. He wanted to run into the building and go straight to Stiles, but he forced himself to wait, the tension building with every second. He tried to reach out with his hearing again, searching through the confusion of noise for some trace of that voice. Instead, he heard a voice complaining about having a worker snatched away with no warning after only a week. 

“We’re supposed to get notice when someone’s about to be released so we don’t send them out into the world in this condition,” the man complained. 

Derek’s heart rose into a panicked race again. This condition? He had to be talking about Stiles. What had they done to him? 

Another voice was trying to placate the first, saying that it wasn’t their fault, “The kid got an outside payment. How the hell were we supposed to predict that?” 

“I don’t care. Can’t you do something to buy time? Slap him with an early payment fee or something.” 

“We’ve done that but it’s not enough. I don’t think you grasp this: the kid’s out of debt. We have to let him go. Just say the kid’s clumsy. You filed an accident report, right?” 

“Of course.” 

“Then there’s no problem. It’s his word against yours and who’s going to believe some deadbeat kid?” 

Derek was barely holding the change back. What had these people done to Stiles? They’d done something they were worried about being public knowledge. They wanted to buy time to let whatever it was heal, and that meant that Stiles was injured. 

Derek paced the reception area with anxious fury, holding back the shift by the slenderest thread of self-control. He tried to calm himself with the knowledge that he’d heard Stiles’ voice, that Stiles had said he could walk on his own so his injuries couldn’t be too bad. Stiles would be alright. Derek repeated that thought in his head over and over like a mantra. Like a prayer. 

Stiles had to be OK. 

It felt like hours before the door into the building opened and Stiles was led out. There was a purple bruise on his right cheek and his left hand was wrapped in bandages, but he was there, alive and smiling. Derek flung himself across the room and grabbed Stiles into a hug, wanting to squeeze Stiles tightly but hardly daring to press in case there were more injuries beneath his clothes. 

“Hey,” Stiles said, arms returning the hug, squeezing tightly with the uninjured arm. 

Derek breathed in Stiles’ scent, familiar and reassuring despite the faint lacing of pain. He felt warmth against his chest and heard the steady beat of Stiles’ heart. Alive and safe and right here in front of him. 

“Thank god you’re OK,” Stiles said, pressing his head into Derek’s shoulder. 

“But are you OK?” Derek asked. “They hurt you.” It wasn’t a question. 

“I’m fine. I’ll be fine. Let’s just get out of here.” 

Derek had to stop hugging Stiles for them to do that, but he kept a hand on Stiles’ shoulder as they walked out the door, needing the reassurance that this was real, that Stiles was here. 

The second the door was shut behind them, Stiles asked, “What happened with the hunters? Are the others alright?” 

Derek realised that Stiles had spent this past week as scared as he’d been. 

“Everyone’s fine,” Derek said. “Kate Argent’s dead. Peter killed her. The rest of the hunters got arrested for shooting up our house, but we all got out OK.” It wasn’t over, not by a long shot, but they didn’t need to dwell on that now. All Stiles needed to know was that the others made it through the fight OK. “But what about you? What happened to your hand?” 

“Had it stuck in a sewing machine,” Stiles answered. “Then they had the gall to fine me for clumsiness and charge me for the broken needle. Bastards. I am going to sue their asses off.” 

“Do you need a doctor?” 

They reached the car. Derek forced himself to let go of Stiles so that they could get in. The sooner they could get the hell away from here, the better. 

“I’m fine,” Stiles said, sinking into the seat. “They patched me up. Charged me for it as well. Right now, I just need sleep. And curly fries. God, I need curly fries.” 

They would pass a diner on the way to the apartment building. Curly fries could easily be arranged. Derek looked sideways at Stiles, seeing the shadows under his eyes. Were his cheeks hollower? Was he thinner? 

“Did they feed you?” Derek asked. 

“Vegetables boiled to mush and meat that was more sinew than substance. And if you dared complain, they gave you the worst helpings at the next meal.” 

Derek nodded. He would definitely stop for food on the way back. 

“And sleep?” Derek asked. 

“We had a sixteen-hour work day,” Stiles said, “and of course they didn’t count bathroom breaks and meals and shower times and stuff, so we only got about a six-hour window to sleep, and of course I kept worrying about you guys so those six hours weren’t exactly restful. I could cope for a week but some of the people who’d been there years were constantly sleep-deprived. They wanted us exhausted. Tired people don’t fight back.” 

“Rest then. You’re safe now.” 

Stiles closed his eyes and was soon asleep. Derek left him dozing while he hurried into the diner and came out with a takeaway bag of burger and triple helping of curly fries. The smell was enough to wake Stiles up and he descended on his food like a starving man while Derek drove off again. Stiles shoved fries into his mouth so fast that it was astonishing he didn’t choke. Derek kept watch out of the corner of his eye in case he needed to pull over and perform the Heimlich. 

After a few minutes, Stiles stared out at the route they were taking, a frown forming. He said something around the fries, the words barely intelligible around the food. He’d noticed this wasn’t the way back to the house. 

“The house got shot up by hunters,” Derek said. “We made it out OK but the house is a crime scene right now so we’re staying somewhere else. On the plus side, you’ve got a real bed.” 

Stiles swallowed his current mouthful and said, “A bed would be nice.” 

Then he dove back into his bag of food. He’d finished eating by the time Derek pulled up in front of the apartment building. Stiles followed Derek out of the car and there was Peter, waiting at the bottom of the stairs. 

“Hey, Peter,” said Stiles. Then Peter pulled him into a hug, sniffing at him as Derek had done. Stiles hugged back and Derek tried to squash down feelings of annoyance. Stiles wasn’t his alone. He had no right to resent Peter for getting a hug, but still the feelings lingered. It made the hug Stiles had given him seem less special. 

“Let’s get you to bed,” Derek said. “We can talk lawyers and next steps once you’ve had a nap.” 

Stiles nodded, “But you can still work on this while I sleep.” 

He reached down the back of his pants and pulled out sheets of paper, crumpled and slightly warm from being next to his skin, and covered in numbers written in pencil. The account codes and debt amounts Stiles had gathered. These papers were the reason Stiles had endured everything he’d been through in the past week. Derek took the paper and hoped it was worth it. 

“Now,” said Stiles, “where’s this bed you promised me?” 

“The apartment’s up at the top,” Derek said. Stiles looked at the stairs with horror but they hadn’t got the elevator fixed yet, so Derek scooped Stiles up in his arms and started carrying him up. 

Stiles laughed a little. 

“This is ridiculous,” he said, but he didn’t try get Derek to set him down. Instead, he curled into Derek’s chest and closed his eyes.


	21. Chapter 21

Stiles ate pizza for almost the entirety of the meeting with the lawyer, going through an entire medium peperoni before they were done. Their lawyer, Harold Wilkinson, seemed not to mind in the slightest, even when Stiles talked around half-chewed mouthfuls. No one had the heart to criticise Stiles for his utter lack of manners. Derek wasn’t sure how much was just Stiles being Stiles, and how much of this behaviour was a result of a week of deprivation. He could only imagine how much worse it would be for those who’d been in the program longer. 

They would need food before tomorrow, Derek realised. They’d bought some basic supplies but it was clear now that they’d need a lot more. The people they’d be rescuing would be as eager for something decent to eat as Stiles had been, probably more so. They had to make sure that there would be something hot waiting for anyone who came back here with them. He pulled out the notebook he’d been using and scribbled down some notes while Wilkinson discussed details of the legal cases with Stiles. 

There would be multiple cases. Stiles was suing his dad’s insurance company for not paying out the money that they should have done, given that the injuries should have covered under his dad’s contract with them. He was suing the whole debtors’ program for stripping him of his constitutional rights to freedom and education. Wilkinson thought they stood a good chance of getting a large settlement on that one, especially since Stiles was a minor and the debt hadn’t been of his making. There was also a plan for a class action suit against the sweatshop. Wilkinson wanted to talk to everyone that they rescued from that place to build up the evidence for the law suit. They might even attempt to bring criminal charges against some of the individuals involved in the worst of the abuse, depending on what evidence they could acquire. 

On the subject of evidence, Wilkinson was talking about the need to document Stiles’ injuries, the sooner the better. This was the very thing Derek had overheard a conversation about back while he’d been waiting to pick Stiles up. Right now, Stiles was injured and this was physical evidence of the abusive nature of the sweatshop. Wilkinson had arranged with a doctor associate who would be happy to make a house call, especially when he learned what Peter was willing to pay. Peter, like Derek, didn’t think Stiles ought to be sitting around in hospitals right now when he could be eating pizza on the couch wrapped in a blanket. 

So Stiles was sitting on the couch, eating pizza, and wrapped in a blanket. The lawyer was an unfortunate necessity. When the doctor arrived, Derek showed him up and the man started a full physical examination, including taking photos of the bruise on Stiles’ cheek, along with others on his shins, and one on his lower back. The different colouring suggested they’d happened at different times. 

Derek fought to hold back a growl. 

“How did they happen?” the doctor asked. 

“This one,” Stiles touched his cheek, “was when the supervisor hit me with the back of his fist because I was talking to one of the other workers. These,” he gestured to his legs, “were from this metal strut between the legs of the table. The supervisor shoved the back of my chair and pushed me into the table. When I complained that it hurt, they took my chair away and made me stand for the next fourteen hours. I had to bend forward over the sewing machine and that seriously killed my back. The next day, they gave me a chair with a broken back and I kept bashing against the broken bit whenever I leaned too far back. That’s when this,” he touched the bruise on his back, “happened. But I couldn’t complain or they’d take the chair away again and that was worse.” 

As well as the doctor’s photographs, the lawyer was writing down all of this. Derek wondered if they ought to be calling Parrish here and trying to arrest these people, not just sue them. He wondered if he should be tracking those people down and making them pay personally. The local hunters were all locked up right now. No one would notice a little, light mauling. 

The worst moment was when the doctor undid the bandages to get a better look at Stiles’ hand. There was a line of tiny scabs across his hand, little marks where the needle had driven through his flesh, ending in a jagged cut about a centimetre long. 

“They didn’t want to do anything that would hurt my ability to work,” Stiles said, “but it still hurt like hell.” 

“They’re going to pay,” Derek promised. 

Wilkinson nodded his agreement but then said, “But these things take time. It could take months to reach a resolution. I want you to remember that. In the meantime,” he said, as the doctor rewrapped Stiles’ hand, “there’s one more matter we need to discuss.” 

“What matter?” Stiles asked. 

“The adoption papers,” Wilkinson said. 

“What?” Stiles looked at him. He looked horrified. Derek had thought he’d be happy or grateful or something. Surprise was expected, but not the stricken look on Stiles’ face. Derek wondered if they’d made a mistake. 

“You’re still a minor,” Peter pointed out. “Legally, someone has to take responsibility for you and we didn’t think you’d want it to be a foster home. If Laura adopts you, you can stay with us.” 

Stiles still looked horror-struck about this situation, “But what about my dad? I can’t just... It would be like abandoning his memory. No. I... No. Just no!” 

He flailed his hands, despite the fact that the doctor was trying to finish the bandage. He looked like he might go into a panic attack at the mere thought and there were tears in his eyes. Derek understood. Everything Stiles had shared with his dad had been taken away from him. All he had left now was his name. Derek tried to imagine how he’d feel if someone had taken him after the fire and told him he was part of another family, taking away the Hale name that bound him to his pack and his memory of his lost parents. 

Wilkinson leaned forward in his seat, raising a hand to silence Stiles’ objections. 

“It’s OK,” he said. “There’s an alternative option. Legal guardianship. The Hales could take legal authority for you, but wouldn’t take on the role of parent. Your old family would stay your family. You would keep your last name. Your dad would still be your dad.” 

“My dad would still be my dad,” Stiles repeated. The words obviously calmed him. He took a breath. Derek wondered if he ought to go to Stiles, to hug him or something, but Wilkinson was still there and everything felt awkward in front of him. 

“Given your age and situation,” Wilkinson said, “I think it might make more sense.” Stiles nodded. “A lot of the paperwork is similar to what I’ve already provided.” 

He finished up, talking a few points with Peter, and then he and the doctor let themselves out. Stiles stayed sitting on the couch, wrapped up in the blanket. Derek went and sat beside him, not quite sure if he should reach out and put an arm around him. 

“We were always going to talk to you about the idea,” Derek said. “We weren’t going to do anything without discussing it. Sorry that it just got thrown at you like that.” 

“No,” Stiles said. “It’s OK. It’s just... it’s my dad. After everything, he’s still my dad.” 

“Yeah. But if you want to stay with us, legal guardianship sounds like a good option.” 

Stiles nodded. “You’re right. My legal status is something we needed to think about, but I just don’t think adoption would be right and not just because of my dad. It would make everything really weird.” 

“Weird?” Derek asked. 

Peter, who was sitting on the stairs up to the roof access, had been watching their exchange. He now grinned at Derek and said, “He thinks it would be strange to be adopted by your sister because of how sexually attracted to you he is.” 

“What?” said Stiles. “Peter! You can’t go around saying things like that!” 

“It’s the truth. You told me you found Derek attractive,” Peter said. 

“You’re not allowed to tell people things I told you in confidence while I thought you were comatose!” Stiles yelled, jabbing an accusing finger in Peter’s direction. Peter just shrugged, looking thoroughly unrepentant. 

“I just thought it might speed things up between you. I’m going out for a bit.” 

Peter stood and walked towards the door at an unconcerned pace. The smug bastard seemed to think this was OK. Speed things up? What the hell did Peter think was going to happen? Derek just sat there beside Stiles, wondering what he should say, how he should react. Stiles clearly didn’t want to have this conversation, judging from his words to Peter and the nervous way he was twitching his leg right now. Should Derek just pretend he hadn’t heard anything? Or should he admit that he found Stiles attractive too? 

There were still problems with their situation. Their ages, for one thing. The whole reason they needed to talk about legal guardianship at all was because of the age difference, then there was the fact that Stiles would still be dependent on this family. He might not be their employee anymore, but Derek was still in a position of power. Although, technically it would be Laura who’d be the legal authority figure. 

“Sorry,” Stiles said, once Peter had gone. “Peter shouldn’t have said anything.” 

“Stiles, you’re sixteen,” Derek said. 

“Well aware of my age, thanks.” 

“You’ve been through hell.” 

“Aware of that too.” Stiles waved his rebandaged hand. Derek just continued listing all the reasons why anything between them would be a terrible idea. 

“I have a really lousy history with relationships,” Derek said. “And I’m not just talking about the fact that my ex slaughtered most of my family.” 

Stiles stood up and started pacing nervously. The blanket slid from his shoulders into a puddle of cloth on the floor. 

“Look,” said Stiles, gesticulating as he spoke, “I’m not expecting anything from you. I get it. I’m the scrawny kid you got lumbered with.” 

“That’s not what I said,” Derek said quickly. “You’re not... I’m not _lumbered_ , but anything between us... age of consent aside, after everything that’s happened, it would be a bad idea.” 

Stiles bent and picked up the blanket, hugging it to his chest. He stilled his pacing and just stood there, clutching the blanket as if it were a teddy bear, looking at Derek. 

“You think I’m damaged,” Stiles said. 

“What? Where did that come from?” 

Derek stood. Stiles looked so beautiful, standing there, arms wrapped around that blanket like Derek wished they were wrapped around him. Those words had come out of nowhere, revealing a world of vulnerability beneath Stiles’ surface. Derek took a step towards Stiles, hoping to comfort him, before stopping himself. That could send entirely the wrong message here. He stood a short distance in front of Stiles and tried to sort out his words. 

“I don’t think you’re damaged,” Derek said, “but you’ve had a lot happen to you in a short amount of time. You need time to heal.” 

“It’s OK, you know. You are allowed to just say you’re not interested.” 

Derek looked away. 

Stiles took a step closer to him. Derek could hear Stiles’ rapid heartbeat, smell the scent of him. Desire and excitement mingled together, floating into Derek’s lungs with every breath he inhaled. Derek stepped away before he did something stupid. 

“Are you interested?” Stiles asked. He sounded so hopeful. 

“That doesn’t matter,” Derek said. 

“Of course it matters. Are you interested in me? It’s a yes or no question, Derek.” 

But it wasn’t that simple. Derek took a minute to get his thoughts in order. For once, Stiles just let the silence sit there, waiting for Derek to speak. 

“I like you, Stiles. Yes, I find you attractive, but more than that, I care about you. With everything that’s happened... I don’t want to start anything because a part of me will always wonder if it’s just because you feel you owe me something. That’s not a stable foundation for a relationship.” 

“Relationship,” Stiles echoed in a murmur, a slightly hopeful smile on his lips, despite the fact that Derek was turning him down. Derek pressed on. 

“Besides, you’re sixteen and you haven’t even finished high school and my sister is about to become your guardian.” 

“I get it,” Stiles said. “Bad timing.” 

“Bad timing? That’s what you took from that?” 

Stiles’ hand was suddenly on Derek’s arm. He leaned in. Derek flinched back, but Stiles’ lips grazed his cheek ever so slightly. Then Stiles just smiled at him. 

“You’re right,” Stiles said. “Things are weird right now and the age of consent is a bitch and all that, but there’s one thing you’ve missed with all your logical arguments for why we can’t ever be anything.” 

“And what’s that?” 

“Peter’s the one who saved me. He’s the one who found the money that let me buy my freedom. That’s the money that’s letting me pay for a lawyer to bury those assholes in legal fees. Without him, I’d still be owned by the program. So if my feelings were just a subconscious reaction brought on by gratitude, Peter’s the one I should be feeling things for. But do you see me trying to start anything with him?” 

“I really hope not,” Derek said. The mental picture was bad enough. 

“This isn’t some guilt thing, Derek. Everything else you were on about? The age thing? That’s just bad timing.”

Derek didn’t think it was that simple. His history wasn’t going to vanish and, even if they waited until it wasn’t illegal, they’d still be several years apart in age, but he let the subject drop. It was out there between them now that they were both attracted to each other, but other things were more important. Stiles needed to be safe. He needed to finish school. He needed to heal and have a chance to grieve for his dad. Derek would give him all the time he needed. He’d had enough people taking advantage of him in recent weeks and Derek wouldn’t be another of them. 

In that time, Stiles would have a chance to hang out with people his own age. He would probably find someone more suitable to have a relationship with, and Derek was OK with that. Stiles deserved to be happy. That meant he deserved to be with someone who was a better person than Derek.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In case anyone's interested, this weekend I've launched a [new writing blog](http://www.plot-twister.co.uk). On it, I'll be talking about writing in general and the sci-fi and fantasy genres in particular. There will be writing advice, book reviews, author interviews, and things along those lines.


	22. Chapter 22

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the slight delay. I would like to blame work or something, but the truth is I've been binge-watching Community on Netflix. That show is a serious hazzard to my fic writing time. 
> 
> I only finished this chapter this morning, so I apologise if it contains more typos than usual. I figured you'd want the chapter sooner rather than later.

They hired buses for the exodus from the debtors program. They also hired drivers because none of them had ever driven anything the size of bus and they all had other things to worry about today than trying to keep huge vehicles on the road. They had a hundred and forty-two codes, mostly thanks to Stiles’ work at the sweatshop, but including the numbers the rest of them had managed to acquire since starting this project. Derek transferred the money that morning, and then they made their way over to the administration building with the buses. 

Security approached them within the first five minutes, as Derek and Stiles were setting out the boxes of protein bars, fresh fruit, and juice that would no doubt be appreciated by the released debtors. 

“What are you doing here?” the security guy asked. It was the same one who’d been suspicious of Derek the day before, and now he looked at Stiles with a worried frown. 

“We’re here to pick up a few people who are going to be released today,” Derek said. He tried to sound calm. Beside him, Stiles fiddled with a bottle of juice, peeling the label off and shredding it in nervous anticipation. 

“A few?” the security guy asked. He looked at the buses. Laura was busy putting up the signs in the front windows declaring them to be free buses to Beacon Hills. 

Inside the building, someone was yelling. The volume made the words easy to make out despite the walls. A man was screaming about how this couldn’t be possible, demanding explanations, demanding to know how to stop this, repeating over and over that this wasn’t acceptable. 

Someone came storming out of the building over towards the buses. He was a tall man, face nearly purple with rage as he bore down on the Hales. 

“This is your doing, isn’t it?” the man demanded. 

“The paying of the debts?” Derek said. “Yes.” There was no point denying it. With all they were doing, it could all easily be traced back to them. 

“You can’t do this!” 

“It’s already done.” 

“We’ll stop it. We can’t just release a hundred people out of the program. Businesses rely on our workers. We can’t just let everyone go.” 

The man stood right in front of Derek, traces of spittle flying from his lips as he raged. It was probably meant to be intimidating. Derek took a step back, not because he was intimidated but just because he wanted to get out of range. In that movement, Peter stepped up to them, a faintly amused smirk tilting the corner of his lips up. 

“What’s your name?” Peter asked calmly. 

“What?” 

“Your name. I want to know what to tell the police when I ask them to arrest you for false imprisonment.” 

“What?” the man said again. The purple faded slightly from his cheeks. Fear began to crowd out the rage. 

“Well,” said Peter, “their debts have been paid. It’s illegal for you to hold them against their will. Either you release them, or you will be arrested. And don’t think your bosses will defend you. The people whose profits you are so staunchly defending will string you out to dry because it will take some of the spotlight away from them and their guilt. These people make their fortunes by locking other people up. Do you really think they’ll care if you get locked up for them?” 

“That’s... that’s not....” The purple was entirely replaced by white now. Peter patted the man on the shoulder. 

“You run along now. Go and do your job and arrange for the release of these people.” 

“But they’ll... they’ll crucify me if I just let everyone go.” 

“If they fire you for doing your job,” Peter said, “I can recommend a good lawyer to sue their asses for unlawful dismissal. On the other hand, if you don’t do your job, I’m sure I can find a good lawyer to make sure you never see the light of for locking up people whose only crime was being poor.” Peter smiled. It was a cold, calculating smile that put shivers down Derek’s spine even though they were on the same side. 

“Your choice,” Peter finished. 

The man nodded and slunk back towards the building. The security guy had been watching too and now he clearly decided that discretion was the better part of valour because he backed off and left them by the buses to prepare for the first releases. It would take a while to get everyone out. For one thing, all the former debtors would need to be brought here to be processed and it was a good bet that the sweatshop didn’t have buses laid on, for another, every person could have to go through the bureaucracy. 

“That was awesome, Peter,” Stiles said. Peter looked surprised and more than a little pleased at the compliment. 

Derek turned his attention back to the building. There was a bit more yelling and then someone walked out of the building. It was the thin, black woman Derek had met in the interview room when he’d brought Stiles back in. She looked over to them and the buses, straightened up, and strode across the parking lot. Derek remembered how small and scared she’d seemed the first time he’d seen her, but now she stood tall as she looked him in the eye. 

“Thank you,” she said. 

“You’re welcome.” 

She looked at the buses, “You’ll take me into Beacon Hills for free?” 

“Yes, but probably not for a while. We’re expecting a lot of other people to be released. It could take some time.” 

“I can wait.” 

Her eyes drifted to the box of fruit. She looked away. She looked back at the box. She didn’t ask. Stiles chewed his lip in an effort to hide the smile as he bent down and grabbed her a banana and tossed it to her. 

“Y’all are really doing this out of the goodness of your hearts?” the woman asked. 

“I was in the system,” Stiles said. “I know it sucks.” 

Laura approached with a clipboard. She’d tallied the woman’s release and now she asked whether she’d need a place to sleep or a job. They didn’t have unlimited beds and the jobs would be even harder to organise, so she was going into full project management role, trying to manage everyone and work out what resources would be needed. 

Over the next several hours, people came out of the building in ones and twos. All of them came over to the buses, even those who’d called friends and families to pick them up. They talked to Laura and took hastily printed cards of contact details so that they could be in touch around the legal cases. They also offered grateful thanks. Derek found himself hugged more times than he’d been in the previous decade. He stood there awkwardly in strangers’ embraces, all the while Stiles smirked at him. Stiles was a lot more relaxed about hugging the former sweatshop employees who recognised him and his part in this. 

“I can’t believe you actually did it,” at least a dozen of them told Stiles as they came out. 

“I thought you were delusional,” one said. 

“I just thought you were lying,” another said. 

Not everyone was so enthusiastic. A couple of people looked suspiciously at the buses and the free food. When Laura asked whether they would need jobs, one man asked, “So is this where we end up in your sweatshop and are supposed to be grateful because you give us fruit?” 

“This is the point where you make a choice,” Stiles said. “You can walk away. No problem. No strings attached. Or you could take a free bus back to Beacon Hills and then walk away. Go and find a hotel for the night. Knock yourself out. Or you could have a free bed in an apartment building that looks like it should be the set of a horror movie.” Stiles turned to Derek, “Sorry, dude, but that place has more creepy shadows than a Babylon 5 box set.” Derek just looked confused at that. 

Stiles continued, “If you want a job, these guys,” he waved at Laura, “have a bunch of positions including making the apartment building look a lot less horrifying, and all of these jobs will include getting paid a decent wage. You don’t want that, fine, no problem, go and find a job somewhere else and good luck to you, but in the meantime, these guys have poured more than two hundred thousand dollars into freeing us from the debtors’ program so maybe you could stop looking at them like they’re monsters!” 

A crowd had gathered around, watching his little speech. The two who’d been suspicious gave mumbled apologies and snuck away from the glares of those who’d been enthusiastically hugging the Hales. 

Before long, there were enough people to fill up one of the buses. Laura headed off with the first group because things would need considerable organisation back at the apartment building. She left her clipboard with Derek, who ordered pizza for the rest of them, and they were soon having an informal pizza party in the parking lot. 

Inside the building, someone was yelling again. It was a different this time, but still an angry male voice. He was screaming about incompetence and unprofessionally behaviour. It didn’t take long, even over the noise of all the people nearer at hand, for Derek to work out that this man was someone senior involved in the sweatshop. He kept talking about production deadlines and shutdowns. He was furious that he would have to stop his deadline because all his staff had been stolen from him. He was demanding that the people in charge here give him everyone they had, but it seemed that there were only two people who hadn’t been part of the mass exodus. Those two people must have been processed into the system after Derek had been here to interview people. 

“You OK?” Stiles asked. 

Derek nodded, but he was thinking about those two people, who would be stuck in the sweatshop with an angry boss, trying to do the work of a hundred while the debtors’ program people rushed around trying to find replacements. It wouldn’t be fair on them to just let this happen. Derek turned to Stiles. 

“There’s another way in and out of the building, right?” he asked. “The way you were brought in from the sweatshop?” 

“Yeah, there’s an entrance round back for the employers.” 

Derek handed the clipboard to Peter and said, “Show me.” 

They couldn’t get close. There was a fence blocking the way and big signs saying that authorised persons only were allowed through, but Derek could see through to the back door. He probably would have been able to clear the fence without any real effort, but he didn’t want to break any rules. Right now, they were destroying the system by following the law. They might need to change their approach when the people in charge closed the loopholes, but right now they could operate on the right side of legal. 

Derek waited. There was a small security office with a barrier across the road, blocking the only gap in the fence. Derek nodded to the security guard in his office and then stood just outside of the barrier, watching the back door. It didn’t take long for the door to open and the furious man to herd out two nervous workers, shoving them towards a van. 

“Hey!” Derek yelled. “What are your account codes?!” 

All three of them blinked at him, but one of the workers recovered quickly, yelling out numbers. Derek already had his phone out and logged onto his banking app. 

“You can’t do this!” the sweatshop boss said, the instant he realised what was going on. 

“How much do you owe?” Derek asked. 

“No! Stop! This isn’t allowed!” 

The debtor called, “About five hundred dollars.” 

Derek entered seven hundred, just in case the administrators tried to add fees. 

The sweatshop boss tried to shove the other man into the van before he could say anything, but the other debtor had planted his feet and started yelling out his own account codes. They must have realised what was happening today and they were desperate to be a part of it and so it didn’t matter how angry their supposed boss got at them. Derek typed the numbers in quickly. He’d just submitted the second payment when the sweatshop boss ran at him. The man ducked under the barrier and swung a punch. 

Derek could have dodged. He could have blocked. Instead, he let the punch connect and moved his head with the blow, dropping his phone as he did so and sending it skittering across the ground towards Stiles. Derek straightened but made no move to fight back. 

“You can’t steal my workers!” the man screamed. He swung another punch, hitting Derek in the stomach this time. Derek doubled over, more for effect than anything else. The security guard had come out of his office and was trying to get the man to stop. Derek was aware of Stiles talking, but he kept most of his attention on the man in front of him. 

“They’re people,” Derek said, “not property.” 

That earned him another punch to the stomach. The man had no follow-through, but Derek staggered back a step anyway, and clutched at his stomach. 

“You’re sabotaging my business!” the man screamed. He aimed a knee for Derek’s groin. Derek twisted his body and made a staggering step sideways so that the blow didn’t make contact. He was OK with the punches, but there were limits to the beating he wanted to take right now. 

“I just want to help people,” Derek said. 

“You’re ruining me!” the man punched again. “I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!!” 

The man screamed that again and again as he punched, flailing fists until he was breathless. The security guard finally stepped in, hauling the man off Derek and pinning him to the ground. The man kept screaming death threats even as the security guard slipped plastic cuffs around his wrists. 

Derek turned to Stiles, who had Derek’s phone up to his ear. 

“He’s contained now,” Stiles was saying. “I think it’s OK.” 

At the other end of the call, Derek heard someone say, “Parrish will be with you soon.” 

“Thanks.” Stiles hung up. Then he hurried to Derek’s side, checking him over. “Are you alright?” 

“Just a few bruises,” Derek said, for the benefit of the security guard and the two debtors who’d come to watch the fight. “I’ll be fine.” 

“The police are on their way,” Stiles said. 

“You can’t do this,” the man said, to the security guard this time. “I was provoked. You’ll tell them. You’ll tell the police I was provoked or I’ll have your job. You’ll tell them he deserved it.” 

“It won’t matter what he says,” Stiles said. He pointed up to the side of the security office at the thing Derek had noted earlier. “There are security cameras. The whole thing will be on tape of you attacking a man who wasn’t fighting back and threatening to kill him.” Stiles was grinning. “Today really isn’t your day, is it?” 

The man seemed to see Stiles was the first time. Recognition dawned on his face. 

“You! You did this! You deadbeat brat.” 

“And you did this,” Stiles lifted the legs of his pants to show the bruises. “It’s about time you got arrested for assault. Past time, really.” 

“That was amazing,” said one of the debtors. “Seriously. I can’t believe you let him just punch you like that.” 

“You should go back inside,” Derek said. “I’m sure they’ll be processing you out soon.” He turned to the security officer. “We’ll be round the front of the building if the arresting officer wants to get our statements.” 

“Sure,” the security guard said. “Try not to do anything to make my job more interesting.” 

Derek and Stiles walked back round to the front parking lot. The bruises of the fight were already healing and Derek just wished he could do something to make Stiles’ bruises fade as quickly. Back at the buses, Peter smirked at them. He must have heard the yelling. 

“Have fun?” he asked. 

“Just a little,” Derek admitted. 

“We’ve got everyone we’re expecting,” Peter said. 

“We need to wait for two more.” It was a nice bonus to manage that little extra rescue, but it wouldn’t help the thousands of others still caught in the system. The people in charge would do everything in their power to keep the Hales from getting more codes after today. “It’s a shame we can’t just go in there and demand the codes of everyone in the system.” 

Peter smiled his disturbing smile, “I actually have an idea about that.” 

“What kind of idea?” Derek didn’t know whether to be intrigued or terrified. 

“I think we need to pay our old friend Grennich a visit.”


	23. Chapter 23

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter's a little short but I figured you'd probably prefer I post it now rather than having to wait for a longer one. 
> 
> I feel like I ought to stick a trigger warning on this for Peter being Peter but now with added dramatics. Also, there's a little bit of gross stuff with blood.

It was ridiculously easy to get into the apartment building that Grennich lived in, it just took a bit of time. Peter and Derek waited outside the building in the darkness until a woman approached holding two shopping bags. She manoeuvred her bags to get her key in the door and was just struggling to get the door open when Peter hurried up and flashed her a charming smile. 

“Here,” he said. “Allow me.” 

He took hold of the door and held it open for her. 

“Thanks,” the woman said as she walked inside. Shifting her bags back so she had one in either hand. 

“Do you need a hand with those?” Peter offered. 

“No. I’ve got it from here.” She walked over to the elevator while Peter held the door and jerked his head at Derek to follow him inside. Derek and Peter waited beside the woman as the elevator creaked and jerked its way down. 

“I’ve not seen you around here before,” the woman said. She was starting to seem nervous at the fact there were two men beside her, men who had followed her into her building late at night when there was no one around. Peter gave another of those charming smiles. 

“We’re just visiting a friend. Don’t worry, we’ll keep the noise to a minimum.” He acted like her only concern was the possibility of a noisy party, which did a little to disarm her worries. When the elevator arrived, he pressed the button for the fifth floor and the woman pressed for third. She eyed Derek suspiciously. Derek didn’t even try for the charming smile technique that was working so well for Peter; he’d probably just make her more nervous of him. She left the elevator quickly when it reached her floor and the two werewolves continued up to Grennich’s floor. 

They walked to the door and both stood for a minute, listening. There was quiet from within the apartment. Two doors down, a TV was playing. At the end of the hall, a couple were talking. Other than that, it was quiet. Most of the residents must be asleep. 

“Remember what I said earlier,” Peter said, “let’s keep noise to a minimum.” 

He placed a hand on the door, right over where the lock would be, and shoved. There was a splintering crack of wood. It wasn’t particularly quiet, but it was quick. An instant later, Peter and Derek were on the other side of the door, which was closed behind them. They listened again, hearing one of the couple asking what the noise was and the other answering that someone probably just dropped something next door. If any of the sleepers had woken, they didn’t come out into the hallway to investigate. 

Inside this apartment, Grennich had grunted and there was a rustle of sheets as he shifted in bed. Peter held up a single hand, instructing Derek to wait. Derek waited. 

Derek felt impossibly tense right now. They were committing a crime, breaking into someone’s house to threaten him. Yes, the guy deserved it, but they were breaking the law and if they got caught it would be a disaster. The possible consequences of failure were enormous and a part of him wished they could just walk away. 

The bedroom had been silent for more than two minutes before Peter beckoned for Derek to follow. They crept, silent as shadows, across the apartment and Peter eased the bedroom door open. Inside, everything was dark and still, the only noise the breathing of the bed’s occupant. Peter went to the bed, glanced at Derek, and then slammed his hand down over the sleeper’s mouth. 

Grennich was awake in an instant, squirming and thrashing and trying to pull free, noises of protest and distress emerging around Peter’s smothering hand. Peter pressed his other hand against Grennich’s chest, holding him against the bed. He appeared not to notice that Grennich was hitting him and trying to claw at the hand over his mouth. 

“Hush now,” Peter said quietly. “Please don’t make me rip out your tongue. It would make it so much harder to talk to you. Unless you know sign language. You don’t know sign language, do you?” 

Grennich moved his head as much as he could under Peter’s grip in what was probably meant to be a shake. His struggles stilled slightly, his protests quieting. Either the threat about his tongue had worked or he’d realised that his attempt to fight hand no effect. 

“Now,” Peter said, “I’m going to take my hand away. If you try to scream, I will have to block up your mouth with something. I could cut off your fingers and shove them down your throat. I haven’t done that for a while.” 

That was more gruesome than Derek’s suggestion. Derek had said they could threaten to kill anyone who came to investigate the noise, but Peter didn’t think Grennich would care enough about his neighbours to listen to that. Threatening to choke him on his own fingers seemed to do the trick though. When Peter asked if he would be quiet, Grennich attempted a nod. Peter moved the hand away and Grennich stared up at Peter in terror. 

“Why are you doing this?” Grennich asked in a tiny whisper. 

“Don’t act so surprised,” Peter said. “You have been warned time and again that sins get punished and you have committed so many sins.” 

Peter leaned closer as he said the last part and let his eyes shine, smiling with a mouth full of fangs. Grennich actually whimpered. Derek bit down on the urge to smile at that sound because he probably wouldn’t manage to make it as creepy as Peter and he didn’t want to give the game away. 

“What are you?” Grennich asked. 

“The human is language is so limited. I doubt there’s a word that encompasses the entirety of our purpose, our being, but we’ll stick with one that’s close enough.” Peter smiled again and ran his tongue across a line of sharp teeth. He held a hand in front of Grennich’s face and let the claws extend. “Demons.” 

The only thing that kept Derek from rolling his eyes at Peter’s dramatics was the fact that they needed Grennich to stay terrified. As it was, he was probably close to wetting the bed. 

“Please,” Grennich whimpered. “Please don’t hurt me. Please.” He turned to Derek, standing in the shadows, eyes pleading. Derek let his own eyes shine blue. 

“You can earn redemption,” Derek said. He stepped closer to the bed. Grennich frowned at him, obviously trying to make out his face in the darkness. 

“I know you,” Grennich said. “I’ve seen you before.” 

They’d known there was a chance Grennich would recognise them so they’d factored this in and made it part of the plan. 

“Every soul,” Peter said, running a claw down Grennich’s cheek, “gets three chances at redemption. Three tests. You failed the first one quite spectacularly. We gave you the chance to show some compassion to a young boy who was suffering through no fault of his own. All you had to do to pass was show some basic human decency. A kind word, an expression of sympathy, anything.” 

“Instead,” Derek let his anger growl out, “you insulted a pure-hearted boy, implied he was a prostitute, and treated him like filth.” 

“As I said,” Peter stroked the man’s cheek again, “abject failure.” 

“I’m sorry,” Grennich said. 

“Those words might have been enough for the first test,” Peter said, “but the second is much harder but you really should try to pass it. You won’t want to know about the third test.” 

“What do I need to do?” 

“Atone. You must attempt to undo the harm you have done. Apologise to those you have hurt. Confess your crimes and accept the punishment of human justice. Go to the police and confess to all the times you knew abuse was happening and did nothing, admit to those times when suffering souls told you they’d been raped and you punished them further with prostitution charges and forced them to stay with those who had hurt them.” 

Derek remembered the conversation he’d overheard and added, “Admit to all the times when you encouraged others to be as bad as you. Like the co-worker two days ago who told you a debtor had been raped. You told him to fine the woman and ignore the complaint of abuse.” 

Grennich whimpered again, “You know about that? But there was no one else there.” 

Peter let his eyes shine again, “You think that matters? All your crimes, all your secret sins, you need to make right. Admit them all to the world and accept the punishment the world gives you.” 

“And then I’ll pass the test?” 

“You also have to try and undo the damage. All those people who endured indentured service longer because you gave them fines, or who suffered abuse because you failed to report their employers, you need to set free. Pay off their debts with your own money. Give their account codes to others who want to help them. Every single person you hurt must be set free before you can pass this test.” 

Grennich looked as terrified now as he had been when Peter had threatened to tear his fingers off, “But I can’t remember them all. I don’t know all their names, their codes. How will I know who to set free?” 

“Then I guess you’d better help free them all,” Peter said, “because if you fail the second test, then you will face the third and then I get to really have fun with you.” 

Peter placed the claw of his right hand against his left wrist and cut a little slash into his flesh. Before either Derek or Grennich could react, Peter pressed the cut against the human’s mouth. Grennich writhed again and tried to pull away, but not before the blood trickled past his lips. Peter only held his wrist there for a few seconds. When he pulled it away, Grennich’s lips were smeared with red and he looked like he might throw up. 

Peter smiled again and licked his tongue across his wrist, removing the remains of the blood. He showed the now-healed wrist to Grennich. 

“I’ve marked you as mine,” Peter said. “My blood is inside you. That means I will always be able to find you. If you try to run, I will hunt you down. For the rest of your life, you need to seek atonement for the crimes you have committed because if you stop trying and you haven’t done all you need to do to pass the second test, then you will be mine.” Peter leaned down over the bed and pressed his mouth to Grennich’s ear. “I really hope you fail. I really hope I get to play with you.” 

Then Peter cut a tiny nick on Grennich’s cheek, small enough that it could be mistaken for a shaving cut. 

“I don’t want you to think that this was just a nightmare when the morning comes,” Peter said. Then he turned and walked away. Derek followed. 

Derek knew he hadn’t really been necessary for this act and a part of him wished he’d not seen his uncle being so terrifyingly creepy, but still he was glad to know that the man had suffered. Hopefully, he would follow Peter’s instructions. He had been told to help free the debtors and to confess his crimes to the police. His testimony could be enormous help in getting justice for all those who’d been abused at the hands of employers or trapped far longer than their sentence by unfair fees. Grennich might just be their greatest weapon. 

In the elevator on their way back down, Derek turned to Peter, “Was the blood drinking thing really necessary?” 

“You have no sense of the dramatic.”


	24. Chapter 24

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No, I haven't disappeared off the face of the Earth. I have however been distracted by real life and other writing. I've finished the first draft of my next book (huzzah!). I also went to see X-Men: Apocalspe which naturally meant I got hit with inspiration for a Cherik fic which demanded that I start writing it straight away, so watch out for that soon (the Cherik fic is so far about 50% Charles and Erik yelling at each other).

Several of the rescued debtors had some experience of carpentry, albeit mostly from home DIY rather than anything professional. Still, it was enough for Derek to officially hire them for the brand new furniture business that was being set up in one corner of the empty factory building they’d purchased. A lot of the paperwork was still paperwork-in-progress, but they were getting on with building cabinets and tables using the brand new equipment Derek had just purchased. By the time they’d made enough to fill the apartments in Derek’s building, they’d hopefully have practiced enough to make things of saleable quality. 

The creation of jobs out of thin air was surprisingly complicated. It was easy enough for Derek to pay people to clean out the dirt in the apartment buildings or paint the walls, but it was substantially harder to put together the foundations of businesses that could become self-sufficient and employ others without needing direct input from the Hales. Technically, Derek would be the owner for the furniture business, but he would be, once everything was running properly, a silent figure in the background while other people were employed to do all the day-to-day running of the company. 

Peter would be a much more active owner of the new bookshop that was to take one of the units in the mall. They were still debating what was to go into the other units but there was talk of getting people to make handcrafted goods to go in one and running a coffee shop in another. The furniture business would probably take one, but that was when they ran out of businesses. They could just allow other companies to rent the other units, but they wanted to make sure there would be employment options for anyone else they rescued, so at the moment, they were waiting on renting out the other fifty six units. 

Derek went back to the apartment building from overseeing the setup of the furniture production and walked into a building buzzing with activity. The entrance hall looked a lot better now but the air was overpowering with the smell of paint. The floor had been replaced with new tiles and the whole place had a lively air of habitation and welcome. The doors to many of the apartments were open, although that might have had more to do with paint fumes than neighbourly feelings. He could hear voices through many of them, music through a couple, and the activity of cleaning and repairs that were ongoing. 

There was a box of fruit on the floor by the now-working elevator. A hand-written sign invited everyone to help themselves. Derek hadn’t arranged that and he was pretty sure Laura and Peter hadn’t either. The handwriting on the sign was unfamiliar. He wondered if some of the rescued debtors had pooled together their new wages to buy the fruit for everyone in the building. It was a nice gesture if they had, and reassuring that this whole situation could gain momentum. The Hales were running things for now, but it would be nice if those who’d been caught in the program could establish themselves enough to take over the effort of helping others. 

“Derek,” a voice said from behind him. There had been so much background noise that he hadn’t paid attention to the approaching footsteps. Now, tension flooding his body, Derek turned to face a familiar man. 

“Argent,” Derek said. 

Chris Argent stood in the entrance to the building, holding a thick stack of papers under one arm. He didn’t appear to be armed, but Derek wouldn’t believe that for a moment. He would have a gun under his jacket and at least three knives tucked away somewhere. Derek resisted the urge to shift forms. Anyone could step out of the apartments at any moment and he couldn’t risk them seeing who he really was. 

“You got out of jail,” Derek continued. 

“My wife bailed me out the day after the unfortunate incident at your house.” 

So Argent had been out of jail for days and he hadn’t showed himself before. The fact that he hadn’t done anything somehow made Derek more anxious, because it meant he’d waited. He’d taken time before showing up here and that meant he could have planned something horrific. Derek doubted Argent would try something in a building full of innocent humans but he couldn’t rule it out. 

“What are you doing here?” Derek asked. His voice sounded surprisingly calm, almost devoid of emotion. That was good. He didn’t want Argent to see how close Derek was to panicking. He wondered whether Peter was in the building. He knew it was unlikely Cora or Laura were and he really didn’t want to face this on his own. He wondered if he could call without it looking like weakness. 

“I just had a very interesting conversation,” Argent said. “I went to the sheriff’s station to discuss the release of Kate’s body for her funeral and there was a man there talking about how he had seen his demons and needed to confess his sins. I don’t suppose you’d know anything about that?” 

Derek had never been more glad that Argent couldn’t hear his heartbeat. “Given that I’m not a demon, no.” 

“Well, he was arrested for trespassing on the crime scene at your house. It seems he wanted to get you some information. He was extremely keen to pass it on. He seemed to believe it would save his immortal soul.” 

Derek wished he had reigned in Peter’s drama. If the man had talked about glowing eyes and instant healing, it wouldn’t take Argent long to work out the truth. They should have told Grennich to keep his mouth shut. 

Right now, Derek was the one keeping his mouth shut. Anything he said, even to deny knowledge of the subject, might be seen as evidence of dangerous behaviour by the hunter. 

“I’m curious,” Argent continued, “why you’ve been working so hard to free people from the indentured service program.” 

“Someone has to show these people some humanity,” Derek said. 

“Humanity?” Argent sounded amused. 

“You lot weren’t going to show any.” 

Argent clenched his jaw, lips pressing together into a thin line. He didn’t reach for a weapon though. All the humans nearby were probably on his mind too. Somewhere above them, a laugh sounded, loud and cheerful and utterly oblivious to the face-off happening in the lobby. 

“I didn’t know what my sister did,” Argent said. 

Derek was willing to believe that. He’d seen Argent’s reaction when Kate had all but admitted it at the house. 

“If you’d known,” Derek asked, “would you have stopped her or congratulated her?” 

“We follow a code. At least we should. We hunt those who hunt us.” 

“I guess Kate didn’t get the memo.” 

Derek knew he shouldn’t antagonise Argent. The man was dangerous enough with Derek prodding at him. Still, he couldn’t quite keep the words back. After so long hiding the secret of Kate, everything was in the open now. 

“Kate shouldn’t have done what she did,” Argent said. 

“So you understand that rape and murder are wrong? Well done. You might achieve basic moral decency with a few more lessons.” 

Argent looked like he wanted to hit Derek. The papers creased as Argent’s hold on them tightened and he glared at Derek. 

“You think you’re more moral than me?” Argent asked. 

“I know I am.” 

“And your uncle?” 

“My uncle watched his family burn to death and spent six years trapped in his own body in agony because of your family. He has issues.” 

“Well you should help him keep them under control. I’m not going to go after him for killing Kate given what I’ve learned, but not all hunters are so forgiving.” 

“Forgiving?” Derek spat the word. 

“If he hurts anyone else, it might not be me you have to worry about. You need to keep an eye on him.” 

“How about you keep an eye on your hunter buddies.” 

“I won’t be able to stop them if Peter goes around threatening humans. Even humans who apparently have a lot of sins to confess.” 

This was probably as close to a truce as they were likely to get and Derek ought to be grateful for it. This was better than he would have hoped they’d get after the way the fight had gone back at their house. Argent had basically agreed not to attack unless Peter stepped out of line. The only problem was that Derek wasn’t entirely sure anyone could keep Peter in line. 

“Just make sure your guys don’t go around murdering innocent people this time,” Derek said. 

“Don’t worry. The fire won’t happen again.” 

Derek didn’t reply to that. He couldn’t even respond by saying ‘good’ or anything like this because Argent’s promise didn’t really qualify as good. It was the bare minimum required to count as something other than a monster. 

“Here,” Argent said. He held out the papers. “My peace offering.” 

If he wanted to make a real peace offering, he could try paying off some of the debts himself or offering people jobs, but Derek didn’t suggest any of that. He really didn’t want an Argent employing more people because he didn’t trust what the hunters might teach. Derek just took the stack papers. 

“I’ll see you around, Derek,” Argent said. For a guy who’d just talked about peace offerings, that sounded remarkably like a threat. 

***

Laura called a meeting in the lobby of the apartment building because they had a problem none of the pack knew how to solve. Not all of the freed workers showed up, some had already left Beacon Hills to go to family and friends in other towns, but there were enough people that the space was crowded. Laura stood up on a crate to get everyone’s attention and the buzz of talk dropped away. 

“I need your help,” Laura said. 

Derek heard a voice at the back of the crowd muttering about how this was the catch they’d been waiting for. If Laura heard, she didn’t show it. She pressed on, holding up the stack of papers. 

“What I have here,” she said, “is a list of account codes and debt amounts for everyone in the indentured service program in California. That’s more than a hundred and seventy three thousand people.” 

There was an impressed murmur. A few voices sounded concerned, presumably catching on to the problem that was going to come. 

“We can pay a large number of these debts,” Laura said. “We haven’t gone through line by line and done a total, but we’ve looked at the first few pages to get an average and we’re confident we can get through at least half of them.” 

A lot of the debts were surprisingly small. The program managed to keep people enslaved for years on debts under a thousand dollars, but with the money they’d already spent on real estate and the sheer volume of people in the program, even the funds that had seemed endless down in the vault could reach their limits. Derek had been throwing money around on supplies for the new businesses without really thinking of the cost, but that couldn’t carry on. 

“The problem is, what happens then?” Laura asked. “We can free tens of thousands of people, but then we’ll have tens of thousands of employed and homeless people. If we take our time and release only a few people at a time, the people in charge of the program will have more time to change the rules to stop us doing more mass releases. We want to free as many people as possible but we want to be prepared or we’ll just create a mess for ourselves. So I’m going to open this to the floor. Any ideas on how to free as many people as possible while having somewhere for them to go and jobs for them to go into?” 

There was a moment of quiet, with faint muttering as the people gathered talked to their neighbours. After about a minute of this, someone yelled, “Buy a hotel!” 

“Not a bad idea,” Laura said. “It would give us space for people to sleep for the first few days and we’d need to employ people as staff and maids and everything, but buying a hotel wouldn’t be cheap. The more buildings we buy, the less money we’ll have to pay off debts.” 

Derek wrote the idea down anyway. He stood next to Laura with a notepad and was prepared to write down everything suggested. 

“Could you get people to donate?” someone asked. “We could set up a charity to get more money.”

“Way ahead of you,” Stiles answered. He stood up near the front, but not right beside Laura. “One of my friends set up a donation page for me while I was trapped in the system, before these guys,” he waved a hand to Laura and Derek, “got me out. We’ve changed the details now to be a general fund for getting people out of the system. We haven’t got much in the fund yet, but if you want to share it with people.” 

There was a general murmur of agreement. Stiles promised to put the address up on the noticeboard in the lobby so people could copy it down and pass it on to friends and family who might be willing to spare a dollar or two. Even if everyone here only got donations of five or ten dollars, that could be enough to free another person. 

A few ideas bounced around and Derek dutifully noted them down, but he didn’t pay a huge amount of attention until someone asked, “Couldn’t we get the people who employ debtors right now to keep hiring them? Just, you know, not in the system?” 

When this suggestion met with confusion, the man expanded the idea. After all, there were factories and places like the sweatshop where almost everyone working at the site was an indentured worker. Those businesses would have to shut down production completely unless they brought in new workers and, if the Hales were freeing everyone in sight, they wouldn’t be able to get new indentured workers. They would be forced to start paying at least minimum wage and following labour laws about work hours and breaks. Why not keep employing the people who already knew the job? If they cut down hours to reasonable levels, they might actually need to employ twice as many people to get the same levels of production. 

It could be the answer to their employment issues, but there was another problem. 

“Would you have wanted to keep working in the sweatshop if you were given a choice?” a woman asked. 

The man shrugged, saying, “If they gave me a lunchbreak and let me get a good night’s sleep, maybe. They’ll have to be nicer if they know people can quit.” 

“And if they know we’ve got lawyers on retainer,” Laura put in. 

They discussed the idea a bit more, with people from the crowd throwing in some thoughts. They didn’t want to warn people ahead of time that the release was coming, any more than they’d already been warned by the previous exodus. They didn’t want bureaucrats putting obstacles in their way. Still, they wanted to be prepared. The plan was to prepare a set of blank employment contracts and someone could contact the businesses as soon as the release started so they could quickly rehire those who were freed, or as many as they could persuade to stay. They had no way of knowing how many businesses would accept this proposition or how many of the workers would agree to stay with businesses that had enslaved them. They were banking on the fact that not all employers were as bad as the sweatshop. Some workers would probably choose to stay where they were promised work and that would ease the employment headache somewhat. 

They would need to employ a number of people themselves to handle the administration of so many releases, and the rest of the mall units would be handed over to the first people to have ideas for how to fill them. This wouldn’t just be in Beacon Hills but across the state, so they would have to organise transport at the different offices that ran the indentured service program. After a bit more discussion, it was agreed to set up regional offices to handle the administration locally to each of those sites. One person would go to each office from those already freed in Beacon Hills and they would have the authority to hire other people to help out from those released in those other cities. 

The Hales would also purchase somewhere near each of those offices that people would be able to sleep in, either apartment buildings or hotels. They would make large investments in sleeping bags and air mattresses because there would probably be a shortage of real beds for the huge volume of people who would suddenly need somewhere to sleep. If they could convince some people to stay with their employers, it would help on that front too, but they had to be prepared for several thousand people suddenly needing somewhere to stay. 

A lot of purchases would be needed. The more they discussed it, the more Derek felt they were being optimistic to think they could free half the people on the list. At least they wouldn’t be short of properties any time in the near future. 

Laura called the meeting to an end by asking people to talk to her if they wanted to volunteer to take charge in any of the regional offices, or if they came up with new ideas. Derek closed his notebook and waited while people flooded up the stairs or clustered around the elevator. While he waited, a man walked up to him. Derek recognised him as one of the men who he’d interviewed when he’d taken Stiles back into the facility. He was the guy who’d been incredibly cynical about Derek’s promises to set him free. 

“I lied to you,” he said. 

“What?” Derek asked, though he thought he could guess. 

“You asked me how much money I owed and I lied. I told you ten thousand dollars when really I owed about half that. I can give you the rest of it back, so you can free someone else.” 

“Thank you,” Derek said. 

“Why the hell are you thanking me? I’m the one who stole from you after everything you’ve done.” 

“It’s OK. If you give the money to help someone else, I’ll call it even.” 

“Yeah. Of course. Anything I can do to bring in more money, you let me know. I’ll do whatever I can to get every last person out of that system.” 

Derek smiled and thanked the man again. The task was daunting and the logistics of everything that needed organising were terrifying, but at moments like this, it felt like they could actually do it. As he walked back into the loft apartment with the rest of the pack, Stiles gave him a smile. 

“Starting to feel real, isn’t it?” Stiles asked. 

“There’s still a lot to do,” Derek said. 

“Yeah but there are all these people standing with us now. It’s not just us sitting round a kitchen table thinking about how great it would be to crash the system. Even if we can only save half the people on the list, that would be a spanner in the works of the whole system. All the companies that thrive on exploitation will have to change their way of doing business or they’ll lose their entire workforce.” 

“A lot of people are going to be very angry with us,” said Laura. Peter started to smile at that, so Laura cut him off with, “And you can’t go around killing them if they try to sue us for destroying their businesses.” 

Peter shrugged as though this was a minor inconvenience. He hadn’t talked about killing Laura since that day at the vault, but Derek still worried that Peter wasn’t entirely stable. All that time trapped in his own head thinking about vengeance had left him with a skewed view of the world. Derek was worried that they might be facing the Argents and their ilk about Peter’s behaviour at some point in the near future, but for right now, they would focus on destroying a corrupt system. 

Right now, Stiles was right. It felt real. It felt like they could make it. Derek returned Stiles’ smile.


	25. Chapter 25

Derek adjusted his tie for the third time and resisted the urge to tear it off. He hated ties. They were the most useless piece of clothing in existence and their only purpose was to make him feel like he was being strangled by formality. He wanted to just tear off the suit and tell Laura she could do the press conference without him. 

Stiles’ bedroom door opened. Derek turned and was struck by sudden feelings of forgiveness for ties. Stiles’ green tie was a splash of colour against the crisp white of his suit and the sleek black of the tailored suit jacket. Stiles looked transformed, older, like he belonged on a catwalk or a red carpet somewhere. He shot Derek a nervous smile and Derek could only stare. He was so used to seeing Stiles in ratty t-shirts that this young man standing in front of him was a beautiful stranger. 

“What?” Stiles asked. “Have I got toothpaste on my tie or something?” He looked down, checking, and then back to Derek. “Why are you staring?” 

“He just thinks you look so good in that suit he’s picturing tearing it off you,” said Peter from the couch, barely glancing up from his book. 

“Peter!” Derek snapped. 

Derek had almost forgotten that Peter was in the room. He wasn’t dressed in a suit. He’d been banned from attending any event where journalists were likely to show up, ever since the occasion when he’d said some things to a reporter that had been interpreted as a death threat. The fact that he’d intended those words to be interpreted as a death threat hadn’t helped his case, so now he got to stay at home with his books and Netflix, while Derek and Stiles had to go be supportive of Laura and smile at the cameras. 

Across the room, Stiles was suddenly nervous, fidgeting with his cuffs and flushing slightly, a delicate pink touching his cheeks. “Um, well the tailor did a good job at making me look presentable.” 

“I don’t know why you two don’t just have at each other,” Peter said. 

“Because,” Derek started, about to go into his usual arguments. Because Stiles was a kid, because it was illegal, because he was in their care, because they had authority over him. But none of that was true anymore. Stiles was eighteen now and the way that suit clung to his filled-out shoulders emphasised how much he’d grown. Not just physically. All the work they’d put in over the past two years, all the responsibilities Stiles had taken on to help over debtors, gave him a maturity that wasn’t diminished by the nights he spent swearing at Mario Kart with Cora. He was an adult now, legally and actually, and he’d invested the money Peter had given him so he could be entirely self-sufficient if he ever chose to leave the pack. All Derek’s arguments fell apart. 

“Because,” he said again, more firmly. 

“That’s not a reason, nephew,” Peter said. 

“Come on,” said Stiles, still flushing nervously. “We don’t want to keep Laura waiting.” 

Derek gave his uncle one last glare as he walked to the door. Peter rolled his eyes and returned to his book. Stiles and Derek walked down the stairs, nodding at a couple of neighbours as they passed. The building was fully repaired now, redecorated and refurbished. Every apartment was rented out to former debtors at about two thirds the standard market rate so long as they agreed to the clause in the rental agreement promising to a host a newly released debtor should the need arise. They probably hadn’t needed to put that clause in the paperwork, most of the former debtors were happy to help out those who got released after them, but Laura had wanted to make it official. The mass release they’d pulled with Grennich’s information had been a nightmare in terms of sleeping arrangements and she’d wanted to make sure they weren’t left again in a situation where they had thousands more people than available beds. 

Although after today, that shouldn’t be a problem again. 

They reached the Camaro in the parking garage and Stiles slid into the passenger seat, still fidgeting with his cuffs. 

“You’re going to lose a cufflink,” Derek said. 

Stiles stopped fidgeting with his cuffs and started tapping his fingers against his legs as Derek started the car and pulled out of the parking space. 

“You don’t have to be nervous,” Derek said. “Laura’s the one who’ll be doing all the talking.” 

The press might have a couple of questions for Stiles, but Laura would field or deflect any difficult ones. She’d become extremely proficient at answering journalist questions over the past two years. 

“It’s not that,” Stiles said. “Well, it’s not just that.” 

“Then what’s wrong?” 

“What Peter said... about us... do you ever think about it?” 

Derek was glad they were coming up to a junction because it gave him an excuse not to answer for a few seconds. He tried to get his thoughts in order. 

“There’s still a big age difference,” Derek said, because it was one thing he could be certain about. 

“So you do think about it.” 

They hadn’t talked about it in a long time, but there were still moments when Derek caught Stiles looking at him and smelled the arousal. There were moments when Stiles was laughing at something ridiculous that made Derek’s heart lurch. There were moments when Stiles would be sucking on a straw and Derek’s thoughts would go to unsavoury places. More than all of that, there were the moments when Derek couldn’t imagine his life without Stiles in it. 

“I’ve thought about it,” Derek admitted. 

“I’m legal now.” 

“It’s not just about _legal_.” 

“You think I’m too young for you? Too immature? I have been organising law suits and job programs and helping people find their feet. I haven’t been a kid in a long while.” 

That was probably true. Stiles still acted like a little kid at times, especially when Mario Kart was involved, but Derek suspected Stiles would still behave like that in his fifties. He’d been through hell and seen some of the worst sides of people. He’d lost his family and his support structure, his whole life. That sort of thing made a person grow up fast. 

“I don’t think this is the best time to talk about this,” Derek said. 

“OK, but we are going to have to talk about it. It would be different if you didn’t like me. I could accept that. But Peter’s right, it’s ridiculous that I like you and you like me and we both just pretend like nothing’s going on. So after the press conference, let’s have a talk.” 

Derek nodded. He wasn’t sure that was much better because it meant he’d be thinking about this all through the press conference. 

They reached the office and Derek parked the Camaro in his private spot. They were careful to treat all the employees fairly, but there were some perks of owning the company and the private parking spot was Derek’s. Inside, they found Cora counting chairs in the largest meeting room. It would be cramped. They’d talked about having all the employees present but now Cora was talking about fire regulations. They had insisted on using their own cameras with the promise to distribute the footage to all media outlets present, because otherwise they’d never be able to get everyone in here with all their equipment. The employees would have to watch the footage being streamed onto a computer in the main office. 

Laura was at the front of the room, going over her notes. She’d practiced her statement to them last night but, judging from the pen in her hand, she was still making adjustments. Derek went over to her and pulled her into a hug. 

“You’ll do great,” he said. “You’ve already done great.” 

She squeezed him tightly, and then instantly went back to fretting over her notes. 

There was very little for Derek to do and standing around made him feel more awkward. He went and mingled with the employees for a bit, listening to them talk about how they would spend their settlement money. Some were discussing what this meant for their jobs, but everyone knew that there was still work that needed to be done. 

At last, it was time for the conference to begin. The reporters were pressed into the chairs. Derek, Cora and Stiles took their seats near the front of the room, off to one side. Laura strode up to the front and flashed a smile at the cameras and the gathered journalists. 

“Thank you for coming,” Laura said. “As you are no doubt aware, yesterday at 3pm, the Supreme Court reached a decision on the legal case regarding the indentured servitude program, also known as the debtors’ program. The decisions was that the program is unconstitutional and a violation of human rights. The program is to be dissolved and reparations will be made to those who have been hurt by the program. There are still a large number of legal cases open, including multiple criminal cases against those who have physically or sexually abused individuals trapped in the indentured service program, but yesterday’s decision was a great victory and now we hope that a great many people will have a chance for a fresh start on life. Now, I’d like to open up for questions.” 

Hands shot up and Laura gestured to the first person to ask. 

“What will happen to your organisation now?” 

“Well,” answered Laura, “a huge number of people will suddenly find themselves freed from the program with no job and nowhere to live. As an organisation, we will help those people find work and rebuild their lives. I suspect we will be busy for some time.” 

Another hand. “What will happen to the businesses that rely on indentured workers?” 

“They will have to hire workers at the minimum wage.” 

“Won’t that harm the economy? It could be damaging to those businesses that rely on the labour force the program provides.” 

Stiles gave a faint snort. Laura had opened her mouth to answer, but now she turned to Stiles, “Do you want to field this one?” 

“The economy is boosted by having people paid more money,” Stiles said. “All the people now being paid actual wages will be able to go out and spend that money on goods and services, which helps more businesses, so those businesses can afford to hire more people. When people measure the state of the economy, they often look at big totals, but what’s more interesting is to look at the way the money is distributed. The same money spread across a thousand people has more impact to the economy than it all going to one millionaire. Destroying the indentured servitude program may cut into the profits of some big companies by a huge chunk, but those companies having to pay proper wages will help far more people than it hurts and in the long term boost the economy. I’ve actually written a paper using Beacon Hills as an example if you’re really interested in it.” 

“But doesn’t this mean the job market is going to be flooded with lazy de... debtors?” 

Derek suspected that the man had been about to call them deadbeats but caught himself because of the cameras. Derek held his temper in check, gripping the edge of his chair as he fought to stay calm and quiet. 

“A lot of the indentured workers have been forced to do sixteen hour work days, seven days a week,” Laura said. “These are people who know how to work hard because they’ve been given literally no choice. The ones I’ve worked with over the past two years have generally been happy to put effort into their jobs when they’re being treated fairly and with respect. A lot of the people ended up in the program through no fault of their own, through medical debt or student loans, and I think it’s very unfair to dismiss them as lazy without seeing their work ethic.” 

The questions continued for what felt like forever. Derek didn’t have to answer any of them. Stiles jumped in a couple more times when the questions got onto jobs and finances, but for the most part, Laura did the talking. At last, Laura smiled and thanked them for their time. The cameras were turned off and Derek was able to escape that meeting room. 

He couldn’t escape the whole event quite yet though. They were having a party at the office, mingling around the desks and cubicles where people usually worked. All the employees were there and a number of the freed debtors who lived in and around Beacon Hills had also come to join them. Derek was forced to make small talk and exchange pleasantries with people who assumed he knew their names. Many of them looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn’t remember any details. So he just tried to smile and accepted their congratulations. When they tried to thank him for his part, he deflected their words by saying that really it was Laura and Stiles who’d done all the hard work. 

Minutes crept by. Someone brought out the cake and offered Laura a knife. She handed the knife over to Stiles and he cut the cake to camera flashes and smiles. Then Stiles extracted himself from the crowd and came over to Derek, a slice of cake in each hand, carefully held in napkins. 

“Thanks,” Derek said. 

“You look like someone’s pulling your fingernails out with pliers,” Stiles said. 

“I’m not good with parties.” 

“Come on.” 

Stiles flashed a smile and they snuck out of the room. They ended up in the stairwell, since most of the office was full of people celebrating. Derek sat down on the stairs and closed his eyes, enjoying the momentary quiet. 

“We do have a lot to celebrate,” Stiles said, around a mouthful of cake. 

“I know. It’s just, this isn’t my idea of a good time.” 

“We could probably sneak away. Have a party of our own.” 

“Stiles...” 

“Kidding. Well, slightly kidding.” 

Derek picked at the piece of cake in his hand, pulling the icing off. Beside him, Stiles was devouring his slice like his life depended on it. Moments later, he was licking crumbs off his fingers, lips wrapping around each digit as he sucked them clean. Derek swallowed nervously and Stiles seemed to realise what he was doing. He grinned and gave a deliberate moan, bringing his lips slowly from base to tip of one finger. 

“You’re evil,” Derek said. 

Stiles grinned again, “Look, I don’t want to be the guy who keeps pushing when the other person says no, but I just don’t get why you say no. My age, the legal guardian stuff, none of that is relevant anymore. I... I love you, Derek.” 

Derek swallowed. He met Stiles’ eyes. Those words. He hadn’t expected those words. They’d talked about caring and attraction and sex, but not those words. 

“I love you too,” Derek whispered, “but I... when I love people, things go wrong. I don’t want to lose you.” 

Stiles took Derek’s cake from him and carefully set it down on the stair beside them. Then he took Derek’s hand in both of his own. 

“Derek, I don’t know what’s going to happen in the future. Two years ago, I couldn’t have imagined this. But I love you, and you love me, and that should be enough. We can figure out the rest of it as it happens. I don’t want to spend the rest of my life wondering what might have happened if we don’t at least try.” 

Stiles leaned forward, just a couple of inches, his eyes fixed on Derek’s, but then he paused, waiting. 

Waiting, Derek realised, for Derek to close the gap. Stiles wasn’t going to do this if Derek didn’t want him to and, right now, Derek wanted to very badly. He leaned forward and their lips met. He cupped his hand around the back of Stiles’ head, pulling him in close, never wanting to let go. Derek never wanted this moment to end. 

And that was how Laura found them when she came to see where they’d gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was originally planning on having Derek and Stiles sneak back home for a sexy epilogue, but it didn't seem necessary to the story. I'll leave the sexy epilogue in people's imaginations. :) 
> 
> Thank you for sticking with me through this story and I hope you've enjoyed it as much as I have. Especially thank you to everyone who's commented. Comments are what keep me going. 
> 
> My next fic will be a little different - I got struck by Cherik inspiration after going to see X-Men Apocalypse so I'll be branching out into the X-Men fandom. 
> 
> If you don't want to wait for the next fic, you can find me on [Tumblr](http://jessicameats.tumblr.com) or [my writing blog](http://plot-twister.co.uk).


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